All Questions
Tagged with intuition sums-of-squares
1 question
50
votes
6
answers
6k
views
Intuition for the last step in Serre's proof of the three-squares theorem
Serre's A Course in Arithmetic gives essentially the following proof of the three-squares theorem, which says that an integer $a$ is the sum of three squares if and only if it is not of the form $4^m (...