No floating point operations are done below. This is faster and will tolerate higher arguments. The reason you must go only to the square-root is that if a number has a factor larger than its square root, it also has a factor smaller than it.
def is_prime(n):
""""pre-condition: n is a nonnegative integer
post-condition: return True if n is prime and False otherwise."""
if n < 2:
return False;
if n % 2 == 0:
return n == 2 # return False
k = 3
while k*k <= n:
if n % k == 0:
return False
k += 2
return True