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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 ...
The example of the grid shows that this bound cannot be significantly improved. [17] The proof of existence of these large general-position subsets can be converted into a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a general-position subset of S {\displaystyle S} , of size matching the existence bound, using an algorithmic technique known as entropy ...
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.
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 pigeonhole principle states that if a items are each put into one of b boxes, where a > b, then one of the boxes contains more than one item. Using this one can, for example, demonstrate the existence of some element in a set with some specific properties.
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.
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.