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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 ...
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 ...
In mathematics, Euler's identity[ note 1] (also known as Euler's equation) is the equality where. is pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Euler's identity is named after the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. It is a special case of Euler's formula when evaluated for .
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 ...
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.
Description. 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. The induction step (or inductive step, or step ...