Your Name: ​ Michael DeGuerre

Journal: ​ Mathematics Teacher ​ Page(s): ​ 606-614 

Article Title: ​ Investigating Home Primes and Their Families ​ Publish Date: ​ April 2014 

Author: ​ Marlena Herman and Jay Schiffman ​ Category: ​ Discrete Mathematics 

The article “Investigating Home Primes and Their Families” is an activity to encourage

exploring prime numbers at a new angle, home primes. Home primes are prime numbers

generated by “prime factor splicing” (PFS)—a process that takes any composite integer, finds its

prime factorization, then, in increasing order, uses the prime factorization as digit or digits as a

new integer. This process may be repeated until a prime number is reached. For example, 15 =

3*5 -> 35; 35 = 5*7 -> 57; 57 = 3*19 = 319; 319 = 11*29 -> 1129 (prime).

The activity involves using CAS technology to assess whether a large number is prime or

not. The home prime of 24 (called the “child”) is 331,319 (called the “parent”), which will take a

long time to prove that it’s prime by hand. Once students have determined all home primes

with composite numbers up to 100, then a series of questions can be asked: Does every

composite child have a parent? How many PFS iterations are needed to secure a parent of a

given composite child? Is it possible to have more than one composite child to have the same

parent? Is every prime number the parent to some composite child?

It is easier to answer these questions with charts, labeling the composite child, the

home prime, and the number of iterations. There, students may discover that a grand majority

of composite children take 1-3 iterations to find its home prime. The number 80 takes the most

known iterations at 31. The number 49 has an unknown home prime, as it was not discovered

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 up to 110 iterations; likewise, 77 has an unknown home prime, as 77 is the first iteration of 49

(49 = 7*7).

Patterns in this activity is a concept called “siblings”, where composites children share

the same home prime. Like with 49 and 77, or 4 and 22 share 211 as their home prime. This is

readily discovered when going through the PFS process, as they are the first iteration in the

process.

Conjectures then can be said about what pattern exists for home primes. How can one

determine that any given prime is a home prime? This takes strong reasoning skills, but the

authors believe that the investigation will be rewarded with stronger logic skills. The result of

their investigation is that firstly, single digit primes cannot be home primes, secondly, two-digit

primes cannot be home primes if they start with 1 or are in descending order. The came up

with a more rigorous explanation: Let a 2-digit prime be in the form ​ab​, then ​ab ​will be the

parent of the child ​a*b ​if and only if ​a ​and ​b a​ re prime and ​a i​ s greater than or equal to ​b.

3-digit and 4-digit primes took more cases for a rigorous conjecture, as you must also consider 2

or 3 digit primes in the prime factorization.

The authors referred to the study of primes as a stagnant field, and desire to encourage

educators to use unique activities as this to help fertilize this field of mathematical theory. This

can also encourage discoveries by presenting the problem that there exists no known home

prime for the composite child 49. Since the PFS process is relatively simple, then it only takes

more iterations, and better CAS technology, to find the answer that PFS discover Jeffrey Heleen

could not discover himself.

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 This activity is very interesting and does encourage a lot of mathematical thinking that

most secondary students will not experience. This is one of the few activities that allow

students to discover modern mathematics, as the PFS process is about 30 years old, without

any knowledge of advanced mathematical concepts. I agree with the authors that investigating

these numbers with that particular set of questions in mind will strengthen logic skills. The

problem is that secondary level mathematics focuses mostly on applied math. It will be hard to

convince administration that such an activity would be worthwhile.

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