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The problem is uninteresting for K of characteristic 2, since over such fields every sum of squares is a square, and we exclude this case. It is believed that otherwise admissibility is independent of the field of definition. [1]: 137
Hurwitz's theorem implies that multiplicative formulas for sums of squares can only occur in 1, 2, 4 and 8 dimensions, a result originally proved by Hurwitz in 1898. It is a special case of the Hurwitz problem, solved also in Radon (1922).
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.
In particular, for a prime number p we have the explicit formula r 4 (p) = 8(p + 1). [2] Some values of r 4 (n) occur infinitely often as r 4 (n) = r 4 (2 m n) whenever n is even. The values of r 4 (n) can be arbitrarily large: indeed, r 4 (n) is infinitely often larger than . [2]
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 ...
The sum of one odd square and one even square is congruent to 1 mod 4, but there exist composite numbers such as 21 that are 1 mod 4 and yet cannot be represented as sums of two squares. Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares states that the prime numbers that can be represented as sums of two squares are exactly 2 and the odd primes congruent ...
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 ...
Division is also not, in general, associative, meaning that when dividing multiple times, the order of division can change the result. [7] For example, (24 / 6) / 2 = 2 , but 24 / (6 / 2) = 8 (where the use of parentheses indicates that the operations inside parentheses are performed before the operations outside parentheses).