gunnarsen mentioned to me an idea (that he thought might have been hilbert's) about understanding the theory of factorization in a "rng" such as the even integers as being analogous in certain ways to the theory of the ideal class group of a dedekind domain...

i started thinking about this analogy a bit, and it seems somewhat interesting...

might relate to some things that i've thought about before (like kummer's chemistry analogy), but not sure yet...