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Consider a number field $K$ and suppose I want to find the class group and class number of $K$. One of the first steps is to compute the the Minkowski bound. Suppose our bound is $B$. In all the expositions I've read about this, we only consider the ideals with norm a prime $< B$. Why is this? Why don't we consider the ideals with norm 1 or those which are not prime?

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    Think about what it means for an ideal to have norm 1.2011-11-09

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