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G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (1940) He [Russell] said once, after some contact with the Chinese language, that he was horrified to find that the language of Principia Mathematica was an Indo-European one. John Edensor Littlewood, Littlewood's Miscellany (1986) The Principia Mathematica (often abbreviated PM) is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by ...
Mathematical fallacy. In mathematics, certain kinds of mistaken proof are often exhibited, and sometimes collected, as illustrations of a concept called mathematical fallacy. There is a distinction between a simple mistake and a mathematical fallacy in a proof, in that a mistake in a proof leads to an invalid proof while in the best-known ...
In additive number theory, Fermat 's theorem on sums of two squares states that an odd prime p can be expressed as: with x and y integers, if and only if. The prime numbers for which this is true are called Pythagorean primes . For example, the primes 5, 13, 17, 29, 37 and 41 are all congruent to 1 modulo 4, and they can be expressed as sums of ...
In two dimensions, 2x 1 + 2x 2 is the perimeter of a rectangle with sides of length x 1 and x 2. Similarly, 4 √ x 1 x 2 is the perimeter of a square with the same area, x 1 x 2, as that rectangle. Thus for n = 2 the AM–GM inequality states that a rectangle of a given area has the smallest perimeter if that rectangle is also a square.
Calculus. In mathematics, the harmonic series is the infinite series formed by summing all positive unit fractions : The first terms of the series sum to approximately , where is the natural logarithm and is the Euler–Mascheroni constant. Because the logarithm has arbitrarily large values, the harmonic series does not have a finite limit: it ...
The concept of proof is formalized in the field of mathematical logic. [ 12] A formal proof is written in a formal language instead of natural language. A formal proof is a sequence of formulas in a formal language, starting with an assumption, and with each subsequent formula a logical consequence of the preceding ones.
Paul Erdős gave a proof [11] that also relies on the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. Every positive integer has a unique factorization into a square-free number r and a square number s 2. For example, 75,600 = 2 4 3 3 5 2 7 1 = 21 ⋅ 60 2. Let N be a positive integer, and let k be the number of primes less than or equal to N. Call those ...
1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ⋯. First six summands drawn as portions of a square. The geometric series on the real line. In mathematics, the infinite series 1 2 + 1 4 + 1 8 + 1 16 + ··· is an elementary example of a geometric series that converges absolutely. The sum of the series is 1. In summation notation ...