Prime factorisation
Prime factorisation is the activity of expressing a composite number as the unique product of prime numbers. There are two main approaches to this:
- factor* trees
- repeated division by two
Factor trees: we take a number \(n\) and break it down into two factors of \(n\). We then repeat this process with the resulting factors working recursively until the numbers we are left with are primes.
The prime factors of 27 are 2, 3, 3
it doesn’t matter which products we choose as the interim factors, we should always reach the same outcome: 
