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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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    It's a different meaning of "prime" from "prime number." It usually just means an alternate value of a certain type.2012-08-22
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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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    Not synonym, homonym. (I wonder what the word is for "the same spelling, entirely different meaning.")2012-08-22
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    Feel free to edit my answer.2012-08-22
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    The Wikipedia article has a hatnote saying that "Prime number" is a different topic.2012-08-22
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    Thanks, @ThomasAndrews, I knew you would make a better job of the edit then I would :)2012-08-22
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    @OldJohn I understand. That being said you wouldn't happen to know what "combining prime" means? I can't find anything on the web mentioning it.2012-08-22
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    @cory Unfortunately not - the only thing I can thing of is that it might be some sort of terminology used by printers or typesetters, but I could be totally wrong.2012-08-22
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    @OldJohn I gotcha. Hopefully I will find something, it's been bugging me :P Thank you for the help.2012-08-22
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    "Combining" is part of the Unicode naming scheme for characters. It is not used in any mathematical sense. I assume a "combining" character is one that is always bound to another character in some way. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character2012-08-22
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    (The important thing in the image above is that the dotted line circle is meant to be replaced by a character with which the prime symbol is "combines.") @cory2012-08-22
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    @ThomasAndrews that is exactly what I needed to know! Thank you very much.2012-08-23