User talk:Mathmarsha

Greetings
Hello. I noticed that your edit to Sieve of Eratosthenes was reverted. I know it can be discouraging to see one's contributions undone. Wikipedia tries to maintain a formal tone (e.g., not addressing the reader of an article as "you", which is suitable in other types of writing but a bit too chatty for here). In addition, we have a strict policy about not saying things that can't be backed up with sources. Rules like this can make getting started as an editor somewhat intimidating, but with a little experience they become much easier to navigate.

Your edit noted that the primes between 3 and 100 are of the form $$6k + 1$$ or $$6k - 1$$. This is true, but it's not directly relevant to the topic of sieving for primes. Nor is it confined to the 3-through-100 range: if the remainder after dividing $$N$$ by 6 is 2, 3 or 4, then $$N$$ is divisible by 2 or 3 and cannot be prime. So, talking only about primes less than 100 is a bit of an artificial restriction. Not to say it's wrong in principle to do that, but it's more suited for a school exercise than an encyclopedia article. (When something involving numbers happens infinitely many times, we try to make clear that the list of examples we give is just the beginning. See the article on Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions for an instance of this.)

Cheers!

XOR&#39;easter (talk) 20:22, 11 June 2018 (UTC)