Proofs without words

Question

Can you give examples of proofs without words? In particular, can you give examples of proofs without words for non-trivial results?

(One could ask if this is of interest to mathematicians, and I would say yes, in so far as the kind of little gems that usually fall under the title of 'proofs without words' is quite capable of providing the aesthetic rush we all so professionally appreciate. That is why we will sometimes stubbornly stare at one of these mathematical autostereograms with determination until we joyously see it.)

(I'll provide an answer as an example of what I have in mind in a second)

Answer 1

A proof of the identity $$1+2+\cdots + (n-1) = \binom{n}{2}$$

(Adapted from an entry I saw at Wolfram Demonstrations, see also the original faster animation)

This proof was discovered by Loren Larson, professor emeritus at St. Olaf College. He included it along with a number of other, more standard, proofs, in "A Discrete Look at 1+2+...+n," published in 1985 in The College Mathematics Journal (vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 369-382, DOI: 10.1080/07468342.1985.11972910, JSTOR).

Answer 2

Because I think proof by picture is potentially dangerous, I'll present a link to the standard proof that 32.5 = 31.5:

An animation of the above is:

(_{This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Trekky0623 at English Wikipedia. This applies worldwide.})

There does not seem to be any necessity for the particular 'path in the relevant configuration space' that was used by the author of the above animated gif. This may be seen as an argument against including an animation.

Answer 3

The cardinality of the real number line is the same as that of a finite open interval of the real number line.

Answer 4

It is known (see this other answer) that an 8x8 board in which squares at opposite corners have been removed cannot be tiled with dominoes, as the removed squares are of the same "colour". But what if two squares of different colours are removed? Ralph E. Gomory showed that it is always possible, no matter where the two removed squares are, and this is his proof:

(Imagine A and B are the squares removed.) The image is from Mathematical Gems I by Ross Honsberger.

Answer 5

There are a couple of Fibonacci identities, I think. For example

$F_0^2+F_1^2+\cdots+F_n^2=F_{n}F_{n+1}$, with $F_0=1$.

By putting together squares of side $F_n$, one at a time, you get a rectangle of dimension $F_nF_{n+1}$: The two squares of side 1, then the square of side 2, then the square of side 3 and so on.

Here is an image I found online

Answer 6

This is elementary as well, but one of my favorite ones :)

$1^2 + 2^2 + \dots + n^2 = \frac13n(n+1)(n+\frac12)$

(Author: Man-Keung Siu)

Answer 7

It's a long list of wonderful answers already, but I can't resist...

Question: Is it possible to find six points on a square lattice that form the vertices of a regular hexagon?

Proof without words:

Hint: A square lattice is invariant under rotation by π/2 around any lattice point. Use reductio ad absurdum.

Credit: I learned that proof from György Elekes during the Conjecture and Proof course in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics, after constructing a proof of my own that used entirely too many words and made very laboured use of the fact that $\sqrt{3}$ is irrational. The picture here is my own creation (using Asymptote).

Follow-up: Can you find four points on a hexagonal lattice that form the vertices of a square? The proof is similar but not immediate.

Answer 8

                         

This visual proof of $$\sum\limits_{n=1}^\infty \left (\frac{1}{2}\right)^{\,2n}=\frac{1}{3}$$ is from http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/~loki/Papers/Numbers/ (Visible Structures in Number Theory, by Peter Borwein and Loki Jorgenson, The American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 108, no. 5, 2002, pp. 897-910).

Answer 9

This might be trivial but integration by parts has a nice proof without words:

(Got from: Roger B. Nelsen, Proof without Words: Integration by Parts, Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), p. 130; the original link is https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/Roger_B04151._Nelsen.pdf).

Answer 10

There's a picture proof in the Princeton Companion, or alternatively on p. 340 of Hatcher, of the fact that the higher homotopy groups are abelian. Actually, here's a screenshot of the one in Hatcher (hopefully fair-use!):

Here $f$ and $g$ are mappings (with basepoint) of $S^n$ into some space for $n > 1$; the picture shows a homotopy between $f + g$ and $g + f$.

The above diagrams show an application of the interchange law, a more general expression of the Eckmann-Hilton argument, for double categories or groupoids. Here is a more general picture

which shows that the interchange law for a double groupoid implies the second rule $v^{-1}uv= u^{\delta v} $, where in the picture $a=\delta v$, for the crossed module associated to a double groupoid, taken from the book advertised here. There are many $2$-dimensional rewriting arguments which are essential to the results of this book.

Answer 11

$$2 \pi > 6$$

$ $ $ $ $ $ $ $

Answer 12

I'm partial to the proof using Dandelin spheres that (certain) cross sections of cones are ellipses, where an ellipse is defined as the locus of points whose total distance to two foci is constant. It's particularly nice because it explains the foci geometrically, as well as the focus-directrix property with some more work.

Answer 13

Means inequalities:

The image was sent to me by James M. Lawrence, grazie! See also page 53 of "Proofs without words: exercises in visual thinking, Volume 2" for a very different layout of the same 4 inequalities.

Another one exists involving the sum $$1^3 + 2^3 + \cdots + n^3:$$

The second image is due to Brian Sears (Wayback Machine)

Answer 14

Another proof of the sum of the first $n$ squares, relying on the knowledge of the formula for the sum of the first $n$ numbers:

$$1^2 + 2^2 + \dots + n^2 = n(n+1)(2n+1)/6$$

This one has a similar flavor to the fabled proof by Gauss of the sum of the first $n$ numbers. It's a good follow up for students after Gauss's proof.

Answer 15

Wikipedia has a few nice proofs of the pythagorean theorem. Elementary, but elegant.

Answer 16

Duality between $\ell^1$ and $\ell^\infty$ norms.

and the reverse animation

Answer 17

If we have 3 circles on the plane with tangent lines, we can notice they have colinear intersection!

To prove it, we can visualize the same configuration in 3D, the balls lay on a surface and rather than tangent lines we take cones: The colinearity comes from the fact that if we lay a plane ontop of this configuration it will intersect the table in a line!

This is from 'curious and interesting geometry' and the proof is attributed to John Edson Sweet. I really like this proof because it gives a vivid example of the general idea that sometimes, to solve a problem in the most simple way you need to view it as a part of some bigger whole.

Answer 18

I'm quite surprised no-one pointed out this one yet:

Theorem. The trefoil knot is knotted.

Proof.

$\square$

Some comments: a 3-colouring of a knot diagram D is a choice of one of three colours for each arc D, such that at each crossing one sees either all three colours or one single colour. Every diagram admits at least three colourings, i.e. the constant ones. We'll call nontrivial every 3-colouring in which at least two colours (and therefore all three) actually show up. It's easy to see (one theorem, more pictures!) that Reidemeister moves preserve the property of having a nontrivial 3-colouring, and that the unknot doesn't have any nontrivial colouring.

The picture shows a (nontrivial) 3-colouring of the trefoil.

EDIT: I've made explicit what "nontrivial" meant ― see comments below. Since I'm here, let me also point out that the number of 3-colourings is independent of the diagram, and is itself a knot invariant. It also happens to be a power of 3, and is related to the fundamental group of the knot complement (see Justin Robert's Knot knotes if you're interested).

Answer 19

Here's a proof of the inequality of the arithmetic and geometric means in the form $$\frac{x_1^n}{n} + \cdots + \frac{x_n^n}{n} \geq x_1\cdots x_n.$$

Proof for $n=3$:

The "figure" for general $n$ is similar, with $n$ right pyramids, one with an $(n-1)$-cube of side length $x_k$ as its base and height $x_k$ for each $k=1,\ldots,n$.

(I made this in Inkscape, a wonderful free-software vector drawing application. For the inequality and associated labels, I used the textext extension.)

Answer 20

from Steven Strogatz's column: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/take-it-to-the-limit/ (Wayback Machine)

Answer 21

Here is the very first piece of original mathematics I ever did, in high school:

The derivative of sine is cosine.

Answer 22

The sequence of pictures

proves the area formula for spherical triangles ${\rm area}(ABC)=\hat{ABC}+\hat{BCA}+\hat{CAB}-\pi$.

Answer 23

Late to the party, but David Lehavi and Bob Palais both mentioned the proof that $\pi_1(SO(3))$ has an element of order 2. In fact it is the only nontrivial element, and so the double cover of $SO(3)$ is simply connected.

Here's an animated illustration of that fact, courtesy of Wikipedia (here):

Answer 24

Algebraic manipulations in monoidal categories can also be performed in a graphical calculus. And the best part is that this is completely rigorous: a statement holds in the graphical language if and only if it holds (in the algebraic formulation). See for example Peter Selinger's "A survey of graphical languages for monoidal categories". There are many instances, for example in knot theory studied via braided categories. The following specific example comes from Joachim Kock's book "Frobenius Algebras and 2D Topological Quantum Field Theories", and proves that the comultiplication of a Frobenius algebra is cocommutative if and only if the multiplication is commutative.

Answer 25

Sphere eversion

---

And here's a two-dimensional rendering of the sphere eversion:

Answer 26

$$\arctan \frac{1}{3} + \arctan \frac{1}{2} = \arctan 1$$

It's easy to generalize this to

$$ \arctan \frac{1}{n} + \arctan \frac{n-1}{n+1} = \arctan 1, \text{ for } n \in \mathbb{N}$$

which can further be generalized to

$$ \arctan \frac{a}{b} + \arctan \frac{b-a}{b+a} = \arctan 1, \text{ for } a,b \in \mathbb{N}, a \leq b $$

Edit: A similar result relating Fibonacci numbers to arctangents can be found here and here.

Answer 27

A classic one, from the late 19th century, that surprized Peano's contemporaries.

Question : "A curve that fills a plane ? You must be kidding"

Answer :

Well, of course a formal proof was necessary, but it is still one of my favorites.

Answer 28

This proof-without-words of the Pythagorean Theorem is far from a new one, but it's the first one I've ever seen 'in the wild' (this photo was snapped after finishing dinner at a Mongolian Grill restaurant):

Answer 29

I am surprised that no one had cited the "proof" that the rationals are countable yet. See, for example, this picture

Answer 30

I wonder why Apostol's proof of the irrationality of $\sqrt{2}$ - which is as visual as a proof can be (in my opinion) - has not been mentioned: One can literally see at a glance that it proves what it's supposed to prove: the impossibility of a isosceles right triangle with integer side length (by infinite descent):

Note that it's not a proof completely without words. It helps a lot to read the comments of the author:

Each line segment in the diagram has integer length, and the three segments with double tick marks have equal lengths. (Two of them are tangents to the circle from the same point.) Therefore the smaller isosceles right triangle with hypotenuse on the horizontal base also has integer sides.

But through own thinking one could come up with this by oneself (having in mind what's to be proved).