Questions tagged [number-theory]
A field of mathematics studying numbers, their properties and structures that arise from them.
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What is the modern significance of Theaetetus's classification of quadratic irrationals?
Before Eudoxus's theory of proportion there was a theory of irrationals based on continued fraction expansions, which Fowler calls anthyphairesis. Theaetetus is said to develop a classification of ...
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Did Hardy and Ramanujan miscalculate these values?
When I read Dickson's History Of The Theory Of Numbers Vol-2, I found that there seems to be a mistake in the approximation of partition numbers p(200). For this reason, I found the original text ...
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What is Hensel's lemma a lemma for?
Was Hensel's lemma originally used for proving some other theorem? Or is it meant to be a standalone result? Why is it a "lemma" and not a theorem?
user2084
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Who first proved that there is no five-digit perfect number?
A perfect number is a positive integer that is equal to the sum of its positive divisors, excluding the number itself. The first five perfect numbers are 6, 28, 496, 8128, and 33550336.
Nicomachus ...
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Where is First-Order Peano Arithmetic first clearly formulated?
I really should know this, but ...
When/where/by whom was first-order Peano Arithmetic first clearly and explicitly formulated in a recognizably modern form (perhaps exact notation apart) -- with the ...
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Are there primitive Pythagoras triplets (in integers), being with all the terms as powerful numbers?
I'm searching a trusted historical sources about primitive Pythagoras triplets as being powerful integers (numerical examples), or a notable work of impossibility of such a triples, but couldn't find ...
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Who first proved that the existence of a Euclidean algorithm implies unique factorization?
In Simachew's "A Survey on Euclidean Number Fields", he said that Gauss used the existence of a Euclidean algorithm in Gaussian integers to prove that it has unique factorization. Also, he ...
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First motivation for extending Riemann Zeta to complex domain?
Euler developed the Euler Product Formula which shows that the Riemann zeta function encodes information about the prime.
$$\zeta(s)=\sum_{n}\frac{1}{n^{s}}=\prod_{p}(1-\frac{1}{p^{s}})^{-1}$$
Riemann ...
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Notation $n=efr$ in algebraic number theory
When $\Bbb Q \subset K$ is a field extension of finite degree and when $p \in \Bbb Z$ is a prime number, the ideal $p O_K$ decomposes uniquely as a product $\prod_{i=1}^r P_i^{e_i}$ of prime ideals of ...
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Which is the first reference using the terminology "Chinese Remainder Theorem" for this theorem?
The Chinese Remainder Theorem is one of the fundamental theorems in modular arithmetic. As far as I know, this terminology for the theorem is due to the fact that the Chinese mathematicians were the ...
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How did Fermat come up with his Last Theorem?
It's usually believed that Fermat's claim that he had a proof for the Last Theorem is false, and that it might have been more of a conjecture. Or considering it took many centuries and advanced ...
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Why didn't the ancient Greeks consider 1 to be odd?
The Wikipedia page on parity currently says:
The ancient Greeks considered 1, the monad, to be neither fully odd nor fully even
Why didn't they consider 1 as odd? (I am assuming they already had the ...
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Timeline for the earliest work on Frobenius problems
If $a, b$ are positive and coprime integers, then the set of linear combinations of $a$ and $b$ with nonnegative coefficients is all integers past $(a - 1)(b - 1)$; i.e. $\{ \lambda_1 a + \lambda_2 b :...
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History of Reciprocity Laws
Does anybody know a freely available overview of the history of Reciprocity Laws, especially the Cubic and Biquadratic ones? Wikipedia
I know about Franz Lemmermeyer's book "Reciprocity Laws", but ...
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How were number symbols derived/shaped up?
This question was sitting on my to do list for sometime.
So, as I was reading a book on history of science, I came across of a paragraph where the author attempted to give a historical development ...
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What is the name of factoring identity in modular arithmetic?
$(mq) \mod (pq) = q \left[ m \mod p \right]$
Is there a name for the above identity? One would think it is the modular multiplicative identity but searching that gives: $ a b \mod p = (a \mod p) (b \...
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Any historical work on the distribution of prime gaps?
I am looking to see whether historic mathematicians did any work to explain the slightly unexpected distribution of prime gaps?
I would have expected Gauss, who studied lists of primes and proposed a ...
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Does this mathematical result have a specific name?
I am not sure if it's new although it may be an easy consequence of some theorem or lemma.The result is as follows:
By choosing a set of numbers between $0$ and $n$(for any $n$) picking each number at ...
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How did Hardy and Littlewood formulate the k-tuple conjecture?
Let $\mathcal{H}_k = (h_1,h_2,\cdots,h_k)$ be an admissible k-tuple.
The k-tuple conjecture predicts that the number of primes $(b+h_1,b+h_2,\cdots,b+h_k)\in \mathbb{P}^k$ with $b+h_k \leq x$ is:
$$\...
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Was 360 considered a magic number, possibly?
The number $360$ as the number of units into which the circle is divided has some nice properties:
it has as many divisors as a number of its size can have
it's nearly the number of days per year
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