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The Basel problem is a problem in mathematical analysis with relevance to number theory, concerning an infinite sum of inverse squares. It was first posed by Pietro Mengoli in 1650 and solved by Leonhard Euler in 1734, [ 1 ] and read on 5 December 1735 in The Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences . [ 2 ]
Pierre de Fermat gave a criterion for numbers of the form 8a + 1 and 8a + 3 to be sums of a square plus twice another square, but did not provide a proof. [1] N. Beguelin noticed in 1774 [2] that every positive integer which is neither of the form 8n + 7, nor of the form 4n, is the sum of three squares, but did not provide a satisfactory proof. [3]
This list of mathematical series contains formulae for finite and infinite sums. It can be used in conjunction with other tools for evaluating sums. Here, is taken to have the value
The squared Euclidean distance between two points, equal to the sum of squares of the differences between their coordinates; Heron's formula for the area of a triangle can be re-written as using the sums of squares of a triangle's sides (and the sums of the squares of squares) The British flag theorem for rectangles equates two sums of two ...
On the other hand, the primes 3, 7, 11, 19, 23 and 31 are all congruent to 3 modulo 4, and none of them can be expressed as the sum of two squares. This is the easier part of the theorem, and follows immediately from the observation that all squares are congruent to 0 (if number squared is even) or 1 (if number squared is odd) modulo 4.
Diophantus shows how to solve this sum-of-squares problem for k = 4 (the solutions being u = 16/5 and v = 12/5). [ 29 ] Around 1637, Fermat wrote his Last Theorem in the margin of his copy of the Arithmetica next to Diophantus's sum-of-squares problem : [ 30 ] [ 31 ] [ 32 ]
The number of ways to write a natural number as sum of two squares is given by r 2 (n). It is given explicitly by = (() ()) where d 1 (n) is the number of divisors of n which are congruent to 1 modulo 4 and d 3 (n) is the number of divisors of n which are congruent to 3 modulo 4. Using sums, the expression can be written as:
A result of Albrecht Pfister [8] shows that a positive semidefinite form in n variables can be expressed as a sum of 2 n squares. [9] Dubois showed in 1967 that the answer is negative in general for ordered fields. [10] In this case one can say that a positive polynomial is a sum of weighted squares of rational functions with positive ...