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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").
He first used the pigeonhole principle, a basic counting argument, in the proof of a theorem in diophantine approximation, later named after him Dirichlet's approximation theorem. He published important contributions to Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he proved the cases n = 5 and n = 14, and to the biquadratic reciprocity law. [3]
Pigeon-hole messageboxes at Stanford University Pigeonholing is a process that attempts to classify disparate entities into a limited number of categories (usually, mutually exclusive ones). The term usually carries connotations of criticism, implying that the classification scheme referred to inadequately reflects the entities being sorted, or ...
The existence of these polynomials was proven by Axel Thue; [1] Thue's proof used what would be translated from German as Dirichlet's Drawers principle, which is widely known as the Pigeonhole principle. Carl Ludwig Siegel published his lemma in 1929. [2] It is a pure existence theorem for a system of linear equations.
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 pigeonhole principle says that at least three of them must be of the same colour; for if there are less than three of one colour, say red, then there are at least three that are blue. Let A , B , C be the other ends of these three edges, all of the same colour, say blue.
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 ...
The 1622 book contained a brief reference to the pigeonhole principle, much earlier than its common attribution to Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet in 1834, and the 1624 book spelled out the principle in more detail. [4] The 1624 book also contained the first use of the word "thermometer", replacing an earlier word "thermoscope" for the same device.