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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").
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.
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 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 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).
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]
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.
It may be remarked that the preceding proof uses a variant of the pigeonhole principle: a non-negative integer that is not 0 is not smaller than 1. This apparently trivial remark is used in almost every proof of lower bounds for Diophantine approximations, even the most sophisticated ones.