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Although the pigeonhole principle appears as early as 1624 in a book attributed to Jean Leurechon, [2] it is commonly called Dirichlet's box principle or Dirichlet's drawer principle after an 1834 treatment of the principle by Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet under the name Schubfachprinzip ("drawer principle" or "shelf principle").
This theorem is a consequence of the pigeonhole principle. Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet who proved the result used the same principle in other contexts (for example, the Pell equation) and by naming the principle (in German) popularized its use, though its status in textbook terms comes later. [2] The method extends to simultaneous ...
For instance, the pigeonhole principle is of this form. Secondly, while Ramsey theory results do say that sufficiently large objects must necessarily contain a given structure, often the proof of these results requires these objects to be enormously large – bounds that grow exponentially, or even as fast as the Ackermann function are not ...
By operation of the pigeonhole principle, no lossless compression algorithm can shrink the size of all possible data: Some data will get longer by at least one symbol or bit. Compression algorithms are usually effective for human- and machine-readable documents and cannot shrink the size of random data that contain no redundancy. Different ...
Consider the following theorem (which is a case of the pigeonhole principle): If three objects are each painted either red or blue, then there must be at least two objects of the same color. A proof: Assume, without loss of generality, that the first object is red.
For example, π(10) = 4 because there are four prime numbers (2, 3, 5 and 7) less than or equal to 10. The prime number theorem then states that x / ln( x ) is a good approximation to π( x ), in the sense that the limit of the quotient of the two functions π( x ) and x / ln( x ) as x approaches infinity is 1:
The rule of sum is an intuitive principle stating that if there are a possible outcomes for an event (or ways to do something) and b possible outcomes for another event (or ways to do another thing), and the two events cannot both occur (or the two things can't both be done), then there are a + b total possible outcomes for the events (or total possible ways to do one of the things).
The name "Dirichlet's principle" is due to Bernhard Riemann, who applied it in the study of complex analytic functions. [1]Riemann (and others such as Carl Friedrich Gauss and Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet) knew that Dirichlet's integral is bounded below, which establishes the existence of an infimum; however, he took for granted the existence of a function that attains the minimum.