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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").
Brass, Moser, and Pach call it "one of the oldest and most extensively studied geometric questions concerning lattice points". [ 1 ] At most 2 n {\displaystyle 2n} points can be placed, because 2 n + 1 {\displaystyle 2n+1} points in a grid would include a row of three or more points, by the pigeonhole 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 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.
Haken (1985) proved an exponential lower bound for Resolution and the pigeonhole principle. [23] Ajtai (1988) proved a superpolynomial lower bound for the constant-depth Frege system and the pigeonhole principle. [24] This was strengthened to an exponential lower bound by Krajíček, Pudlák and Woods [25] and by Pitassi, Beame and Impagliazzo ...
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]
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.