[12522] in Cypherpunks
Re: prime numbers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Karl Lui Barrus)
Tue Apr 26 23:58:59 1994
From: Karl Lui Barrus <klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu>
To: johnsonc@chem.udallas.edu (Carrie A. Johnson)
Date: Tue, 26 Apr 1994 22:55:33 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <9404262331.AA13940@chem.udallas.edu> from "Carrie A. Johnson" at Apr 26, 94 06:31:40 pm
Carrie A. Johnson wrote:
> I'm just wondering if anyone knows whether or not (1+4k) can be
>written as the sum of squares or not, and if so, what the proof
>of that is?
Hm... interesting. There is a related problem about every integer
being represented as the sum of four squares, but you ask if
(1+4k) can be written as a sum of squares, without mentioning a limit
on the number of squares.
If this is the case, then each number of the form (1+4k) is easily
represented as the sum of squares: 4 is represented as 2^2 up to k
times, and 1 is just 1^2.
So for example 21 is 1^2 + 2^2 + 2^2 + 2^2 + 2^2 + 2^2.
Pretty cheesy, eh? ;)
--
Karl L. Barrus: klbarrus@owlnet.rice.edu
keyID: 5AD633 hash: D1 59 9D 48 72 E9 19 D5 3D F3 93 7E 81 B5 CC 32
"One man's mnemonic is another man's cryptography"
- my compilers prof discussing file naming in public directories
