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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.
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"). [3]
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 ]
Lord Kelvin and Dirichlet suggested a solution to the problem by a variational method based on the minimization of "Dirichlet's energy". According to Hans Freudenthal (in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography , vol. 11), Bernhard Riemann was the first mathematician who solved this variational problem based on a method which he called Dirichlet ...
In 1837 he published Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions, using mathematical analysis concepts to tackle an algebraic problem and thus creating the branch of analytic number theory. In proving the theorem, he introduced the Dirichlet characters and L-functions.
Dirichlet's theorem may refer to any of several mathematical theorems due to Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet. Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions; Dirichlet's approximation theorem; Dirichlet's unit theorem; Dirichlet conditions; Dirichlet boundary condition; Dirichlet's principle; Pigeonhole principle, sometimes also called Dirichlet ...
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 ...
Dirichlet distributions are very often used as prior distributions in Bayesian inference. The simplest and perhaps most common type of Dirichlet prior is the symmetric Dirichlet distribution, where all parameters are equal. This corresponds to the case where you have no prior information to favor one component over any other.