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Developing new picture proofs that the sums of the first n odd integers are squares

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2023

Chris Sangwin  and
Fenner Stanley Tanswell
Chris Sangwin
Affiliation:
School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh, EH9 3FD e-mail: [email protected]
Fenner Stanley Tanswell
Affiliation:
Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Vrije Universiteit, Brussels, Belgium e-mail: [email protected]
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What is it that makes us judge two proofs of the same theorem to be the same or different? This is not an idle question: one central aspect of judging mathematics is the novelty of the mathematics presented. This is important everywhere, from the peer-review system, to assigning international prestige, to funding agencies’ grant decisions. It even matters to some extent in examinations, to avoid accusations of collusion. Surprisingly, philosophers of mathematics have not paid the question of novelty much attention. In this Article, we will consider the appealing conjecture that the main ideas that make up the proof, the essence of a proof, can indeed be identified and that very different styles of proofs can share common main ideas. Further, that a particular theorem can be proved using quite different, independent main ideas. As a means of exploring whether this is plausible, we will present a number of novel proofs of the following theorem.

Type
Articles
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 107 , Issue 569 , July 2023 , pp. 249 - 262
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Copyright
© The Authors, 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Mathematical Association

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