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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 ]
[1] The first known proof is attributed to Axel Thue [2] who used a pigeonhole argument. [3] It can be used to prove Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares by taking m to be a prime p that is congruent to 1 modulo 4 and taking a to satisfy a 2 + 1 ≡ 0 mod p. (Such an "a" is guaranteed for "p" by Wilson's theorem. [4])
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.
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
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.
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]
The simplest and most common form of mathematical induction infers that a statement involving a natural number n (that is, an integer n ≥ 0 or 1) holds for all values of n. The proof consists of two steps: The base case (or initial case): prove that the statement holds for 0, or 1.
In number theory, the sum of two squares theorem relates the prime decomposition of any integer n > 1 to whether it can be written as a sum of two squares, such that n = a 2 + b 2 for some integers a, b.