View source for Talk:Product of min and max prime factors

== "the term for 1" ==

The list of prime factors for 1 is empty. This leads us to the question of what the minimum and maximum prime factors are, in that case. The identity value for multiplication, so if we think of this as forming a list of the minimum and the maximum prime factors and finding the product of the list, it's clear that the product would be 1. That said, the identity for minimum is positive infinity and the identity for maximum is negative infinity, and these operations as list operations on an empty list should yield their identity arguments -- and this product would be negative infinity.

Perhaps it would have been better to exclude 1 from consideration... --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] ([[User talk:Rdm|talk]]) 18:50, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

: I don't disagree. In fact negative infinity is what Raku gets for 1 in the absence of any overrides. OEIS lists 1 as being the result for 1. Don't know the reasoning behind it, as I alluded to in the task description. Just made it match OEIS as that is an "authoritative source". Really, it isn't worth getting chuffed over. Put ''anything'' defensible in there. I just added the line "the value for 1 is defined to be 1" to avoid this kind of bikeshedding. To little avail. :-) --[[User:Thundergnat|Thundergnat]] ([[User talk:Thundergnat|talk]]) 19:28, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

:: The follow-up lines were what prompted this little writeup. --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] ([[User talk:Rdm|talk]]) 19:31, 29 September 2022 (UTC)