What I Learned Today (a new series)

I've had this series in mind for a while now and because I have had such a great day today I decided I would finally start it. So here goes:

Today I learned why the number 1 is not a prime number.

How/why did I find the answer: Honestly I was searching for a chart of prime numbers (I love odd numbers and ever more so prime numbers) and got a bit miffed when I saw that 1 was not colored as a prime. I was previously mistaken into thinking it was. So I immediately googled it and found my answer.

Here is my take on the information I gathered, read here to see if you agree.

Apparently there are more requirements than I thought for a prime number. I figured since 1 is divisible by itself and 1 (me, myself and I anyone) it would be considered a prime. I found, however, that by definition, a prime number also has to be greater than one. Not only that but it is not a prime number because it is a unit and because the of the way we use primes. 

That's a lot, here's more of a breakdown. One is a unit (I still don't fully understand what that means in relation to other numbers so we'll skip.) Here's what I do understand, primes are used as the bases or building blocks of other numbers. We divide bigger numbers by primes to break them down. We break down non primes into primes to find out what they are made of. When we divide a number by 1 we get no new information, we are still with the original number and 1. For example, let's look at the number 24. Now, when we divide it by a prime (let's say 2) we'll get another number out of it, 12. Then we can go on and divide it by the same prime number (2) and we get a 6. Then we divide it again (for this example it looks like we're dividing by the same primes (2) and we get 3. So when we divided by a prime we got another piece of information from 24. The composition in primes of 24 is 2,2,2,3. If we had divided by 1 we would have been left with 24 which would have given us no new info about our dear 24.

That, my friends is all I can explain. Maybe you learned something new after reading this. If my explanation was even more confusing I apologize! Maybe in the near future I'll have one of my math genius friends to teach me about the unit part as I'm too tired to look it up right now.