Re:What's your favorite math proof?
by pmiller2 on Monday December 07, 2009 @06:03PM
(#982445)
My favorite proof is Fuerstenberg's proof of the infinitude of primes, seen here: http://primes.utm.edu/notes/proofs/infinite/topproof.html
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Re:What's your favorite math proof?
by RiderOfGiraffes on Monday December 07, 2009 @06:23PM
(#982506)
That's brilliant! I up-voted you - no idea why it didn't stick.
The real reason it works is actually deep magic. Dirichlet's theorem states: given any two positive coprime integers $a$ and $d$, there are infinitely many primes of the form $a + nd$ where $n$ is a positive integer.
This result is one of the deeper facts of analytic number theory. I have no clue in hell how to prove it other than "look it up in Hardy and Littlewood."