"The way mathematicians have viewed the number one (unity, the monad) has changed throughout the years. Most of the early Greeks did not view one as a number, but rather as the origin, or generator, of number. Around the time of Simon Stevin (1548-1620), one (and zero) were first widely viewed as numbers. This created a period of confusion about whether or not the number one was prime. In this dynamic survey, we collect a cornucopia of sources which deal directly with the "question what is the smallest prime?" The goal is to create a source book for studying the history of the definition of prime, especially as applied to the number one."
Still the case for the natural numbers (with 0 instead of 1). Though perhaps more obvious why you would choose one or the other there.
Going through school I'd be told 1 was/not prime differently by different teachers. Always seemed pretty arbitrary to me; like 'They' ought just to decide!
What we seem to be hearing here is that They had, just another classic case of this information taking 50 years to filter down the education system.. (I wonder how many planets they teach there as being in our solar system?)
For fun I did a linear regression of year vs # planets and found that the while the slope was 1.8 planets/century, this was not significantly different from zero. The evidence appears to be consistent with a constant number of planets.
Yeah, that ended my run at 22 correct answers. Pretty annoying. I knew it was non-prime by definition, but I had no idea whether this quiz was aware of that, so I just made a quick gut decision.