Historical Development
The theorem appears in the Arithmetica of Diophantus, translated into Latin by Bachet in 1621.
Adrien-Marie Legendre improved on the theorem in 1798 by stating that a positive integer can be expressed as the sum of three squares if and only if it is not of the form 4k(8m + 7). His proof was incomplete, leaving a gap which was later filled by Carl Friedrich Gauss.
Read more about this topic: Lagrange's Four-square Theorem
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or development:
“Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than that something has occurred.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“I’ve always been impressed by the different paths babies take in their physical development on the way to walking. It’s rare to see a behavior that starts out with such wide natural variation, yet becomes so uniform after only a few months.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)