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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 ...
If 2 k + 1 is prime and k > 0, then k itself must be a power of 2, so 2 k + 1 is a Fermat number; such primes are called Fermat primes. As of 2023 [update] , the only known Fermat primes are F 0 = 3 , F 1 = 5 , F 2 = 17 , F 3 = 257 , and F 4 = 65537 (sequence A019434 in the OEIS ).
Wilson's theorem. In algebra and number theory, Wilson's theorem states that a natural number n > 1 is a prime number if and only if the product of all the positive integers less than n is one less than a multiple of n. That is (using the notations of modular arithmetic ), the factorial satisfies. exactly when n is a prime number.
For example, we can prove by induction that all positive integers of the form 2n − 1 are odd. Let P(n) represent "2n − 1 is odd": (i) For n = 1, 2n − 1 = 2(1) − 1 = 1, and 1 is odd, since it leaves a remainder of 1 when divided by 2. Thus P(1) is true.
Proof: 2 p+1 ≡ 2 (mod q), so 2 1 / 2 (p+1) is a square root of 2 mod q. By quadratic reciprocity, every prime modulus in which the number 2 has a square root is congruent to ±1 (mod 8). A Mersenne prime cannot be a Wieferich prime. Proof: We show if p = 2 m − 1 is a Mersenne prime, then the congruence 2 p−1 ≡ 1 (mod p 2) does not hold.
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 is a ...
Mathematical induction. Mathematical induction can be informally illustrated by reference to the sequential effect of falling dominoes. [1] [2] Mathematical induction is a method for proving that a statement is true for every natural number , that is, that the infinitely many cases all hold. This is done by first proving a simple case, then ...