Timeline for Sum of two squares - Number of steps in Fermat descent
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 4, 2015 at 10:30 | comment | added | user40023 | @Martin A well-known an plausible conjecture of Landau (and many others) says that $x^2 + 1$ is a prime number for infinitely many integers $x$. This implies that the lower bound is $0$ steps, since $p = x^2 + 1$ is already a sum of two squares and $x^2 \equiv -1 \bmod p$. | |
| Feb 2, 2015 at 12:36 | comment | added | Martin | In the example above this bound would be $6$, whereas the exact number of steps is $3$, so this is a bit too rough. Also, I am more interested in a lower bound. | |
| Feb 1, 2015 at 0:36 | comment | added | P.E. | Dear joro: Thanks for spotting that. It's now fixed. | |
| Feb 1, 2015 at 0:35 | history | edited | P.E. | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 12 characters in body
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| Jan 31, 2015 at 13:04 | comment | added | joro | Why x/p? x<p, so the log_2() is negative. | |
| Jan 31, 2015 at 4:36 | history | answered | P.E. | CC BY-SA 3.0 |