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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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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] Since the problem had withstood the attacks ...
Cantor's diagonal argument (among various similar names [ note 1]) is a mathematical proof that there are infinite sets which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the infinite set of natural numbers – informally, that there are sets which in some sense contain more elements than there are positive integers.
If 2 k + 1 is prime and k > 0, then k itself must be a power of 2, [1] 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 ).
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 ...
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.