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A friend felt the need to explore wikipedia and stumbled across "prime notation". I've been working with primes for awhile (cryptography programmer) and have never seen a notation for "combining prime" until today.

I'm not sure if this is an accepted notation or of it is some wikipedia art. I've searched around the web and haven't come across it. Maybe it is some obscure area of mathematics?

Q: Is "combining prime" an actual mathematical operation and does it have the following notation?

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    You see it a lot more in older books, because subscripts were harder to typeset. So $a,a',a'',...$ rather than $a_1,a_2,...$2012-08-22

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Unfortunately, the notation prime (') mentioned on this Wikipedia page has nothing to do with prime numbers or cryptography. English has many confusing homographs (words spelled the same but with different meanings,) and this is one of them!

The "prime" that the Wikipedia article is talking about is a notation more often used in the past for things like feet and inches. For example 3' 6'' would be used to indicate "3 feet and 6 inches".

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    @ThomasAndrews that is exactly what I needed to know! Thank you very much.2012-08-23