You're approaching this with a hostile attitude, which is preventing you from understanding and/or addressing what other people are saying, and substituting (light) mockery for attempts to understand what others are saying. You're not going to learn anything or convince anybody of anything this way.
The point of using the ring with the sqrt in it is to conveniently demonstrate that the FTA is non-obvious. Since it is only being used for demonstration, and not as part of a proof, faking ignorance of sqrts and imaginary numbers is not helpful to you. There are many things in mathematics where the subtleties only came out later; heck, that's basically the entire history of set theory. Sets are also trivial if you come at them with an attitude of artificial ignorance like that.
But he clearly does understand, and some gentle mockery at the other side is called for when they play dumb.
I'm sure the fundamental theorem of arithmetic has a non-obvious proof. And perhaps that's precisely what a mathematician means every time they say "non-obvious". If that were all just made explicit to this general interest site in the first place, perhaps we'd have nothing to discuss.
But if we are trying to play coy here, 1+1=2 also requires a non-obvious proof to anyone not versed in formal methods. I looked a proof up:
I don't know how long it would take me, working alone, to come up with that proof. It's non-obvious because it took humans probably 100,000 years to come up with it, even though we've had the IQ to do it for a long time. I don't think we could agree on what constitutes a proof of it without some social aspect and convention, so non-obvious by means of proof.
But, we've been using and making predictions about the world using 1+1=2 for very much longer. That seems like a pretty worthwhile definition of obvious.
>>You're not going to learn anything or convince anybody of anything this way.
The tone of the original article is light mockery as well. That's why I am imitating it. I think the author is wrong, it's quite condescending for you to say "you are not going to learn". What about pointing the non-obvious step in the simple reasoning I gave?
>>The point of using the ring with the sqrt in it is to conveniently demonstrate that the FTA is non-obvious.
This is not a correct way to point something is non-obvious. I illustrated why already. It's just not a correct way of arguing.
>>Since it is only being used for demonstration, and not as part of a proof, faking ignorance of sqrts and imaginary numbers is not helpful to you.
It is. It points out why the argument made in the blog post is not correct way to argue something is non-obvious.
>>There are many things in mathematics where the subtleties only came out later; heck, that's basically the entire history of set theory. Sets are also trivial if you come at them with an attitude of artificial ignorance like that.
Some things in set theory are trivial, some aren't. I don't understand your point here. I am claiming FTA is obvious when it comes to natural numbers not that something similar to FTA on some other objects is obvious.
The point of using the ring with the sqrt in it is to conveniently demonstrate that the FTA is non-obvious. Since it is only being used for demonstration, and not as part of a proof, faking ignorance of sqrts and imaginary numbers is not helpful to you. There are many things in mathematics where the subtleties only came out later; heck, that's basically the entire history of set theory. Sets are also trivial if you come at them with an attitude of artificial ignorance like that.