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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 ]
For the avoidance of ambiguity, zero will always be a valid possible constituent of "sums of two squares", so for example every square of an integer is trivially expressible as the sum of two squares by setting one of them to be zero. 1. The product of two numbers, each of which is a sum of two squares, is itself a sum of two squares.
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 ]
Therefore, the theorem states that it is expressible as the sum of two squares. Indeed, 2450 = 7 2 + 49 2. The prime decomposition of the number 3430 is 2 · 5 · 7 3. This time, the exponent of 7 in the decomposition is 3, an odd number. So 3430 cannot be written as the sum of two squares.
Legendre's three-square theorem states which numbers can be expressed as the sum of three squares; Jacobi's four-square theorem gives the number of ways that a number can be represented as the sum of four squares. For the number of representations of a positive integer as a sum of squares of k integers, see Sum of squares function.
In number theory, the sum of squares function is an arithmetic function that gives the number of representations for a given positive integer n as the sum of k squares, where representations that differ only in the order of the summands or in the signs of the numbers being squared are counted as different.
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 ...
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