- This week I learned about prime factorization. Before this week I didn’t even know that this way of describing a number existed.
- It’s an easy way to find the smaller numbers that go into a bigger number. You start with 2 and keep dividing the bigger number by 2 until you can’t, then you divide by 3 until you can’t, then 5, then 7 all the way until you have a prime number at the end.
- Once you broke the number down, then you write it out in repeated multiplication. Example:
- You can also write it in exponent form:
- Once you have the prime factorization of a number, you can easily find the LCM and the GCF and you can find all the factors of the number.
