Well Ordering Principle
July 13, 2017

"Well Ordering Principle" is a very simple concept. It just says,

Every non-empty subset of Natural Numbers is well ordered i.e. every such subset of Natural Numbers contains a least element.

See, nothing could be more trivial. And if you are wondering is this even useful? Believe me, I did that the first time I heard about it and now I am its fan. Another trivial looking principle is Pigeonhole Principle which I won't talk in detail about here though. It says, If there are N holes and N+$1$ pigeons then the pigeons cannot have a hole for each, two pigeons must share a single hole.

Now let's prove a theorem using well ordering principle.

## (Theorem) Let $n$ be a positive integer such that $n>1$ then $n=p_1p_2...p_k$ where all $p_i$s are prime numbers.

PROOF:
Let $S$ be a set of positive integers that cannot be written as product of primes. By the well ordering principle $S$ has a least element, say $a$. Now, if the factors of $a$ are $a$ and $1$ then $a$ is a prime number and thus, this is a contradiction(since $S$ consists of elements which don't have prime factors).

Next, if a is not prime, let $a_1$ and $a_2$ are the factors of $a$. If both of them are prime then it again results in contradiction because $a$ can be written as product of primes. Now, it is obvious $a_1 < a$ and $a_2 < a$. If either of $a_1$ or $a_2$ can not be written as product of primes then, either $a_1 \in S$ or $a_2 \in S$. But we already said that $a$ is the smallest element in $S$. So, $a_1$ and $a_2$ must be product of primes i.e. $a_1=p_1p_2...p_r$ and $a_2=q_1q_2...q_s$. Thus, $$a = a_1.a_2 = p_1...p_r.q_1...q_s$$ which is a prime product. This again created a contradiction that $a \in S$.
Thus, it can be concluded that there is no positive integer > $1$ that can not be written as prime products.

Well Ordering Principle is pretty cool, right?