How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
For every prime the congruence is solvable
Statement
Let be a prime (Prime and composite integers: is prime when and its only positive divisors are and ). Then there are integers with , the congruence being that of Congruence modulo an integer: when , including the moduli and .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: A prime .
An integer is prime when and with force or ; in words, exceeds , and its only positive divisors are and (Prime and composite integers: is prime when and its only positive divisors are and ).
For , means (Congruence modulo an integer: when , including the moduli and ).
For , means for some (Divisibility in : when for some integer ).
Let be an odd prime and let with . Then there are integers such that (Every nonzero residue modulo an odd prime is a sum of two squares).
The group of units of the commutative monoid is ; equivalently, for the condition holds exactly when or ( is a commutative monoid whose group of units is ; equivalently holds exactly for and ).
Proof
If then is a positive divisor of , so [F1] forces or , and leaves ; hence either or is odd, and these two cases exhaust the primes.
In the case , take and : then and , so .
In the case odd, : otherwise for some integer by [F3], hence , so and [L2] gives or , both contradicting from [F1].
For the odd case, apply [L1] to the odd prime with , whose hypothesis is step 1.3: there are integers with .
For the odd case, since , so adding this to step 2.1 through [L3] gives .
Both cases produce integers with , and by step 1.1 no prime falls outside them.
Remarks
Where the odd case comes from. For odd the work is done by Every nonzero residue modulo an odd prime is a sum of two squares at : the set of square classes modulo , the zero class included, and the set of classes for are two subsets of with elements each, so they meet, and a common value gives . The hypothesis of that proposition is what step 1.3 discharges, by an argument that does not use oddness; oddness is needed only to make the proposition applicable at all.
Why is separate. The cited proposition is stated for odd primes, so it says nothing at ; the pair settles that case by computation rather than by weakening the proposition's hypothesis.
Depends on
- Prime and composite integers: $p$ is prime when $p > 1$ and its only positive divisors are $1$ and $p$
- Congruence modulo an integer: $a\equiv b\pmod n$ when $n\mid(a-b)$, including the moduli $0$ and $1$
- Divisibility in $\mathbb{Z}$: $d \mid a$ when $a = dq$ for some integer $q$
- $(\mathbb{Z}, \cdot, 1)$ is a commutative monoid whose group of units is $\{1, -1\}$; equivalently $u \mid 1$ holds exactly for $u = 1$ and $u = -1$
- Every nonzero residue modulo an odd prime is a sum of two squares
- Congruent integers may be added, subtracted and multiplied: representative changes preserve both arithmetic operations
Used by
Dependency tree · two levels
34 results within two dependency steps of this one, each drawn at its shortest distance from it. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, so the chart reads left to right and ends at this result, which carries a heavier outline. Every node is a link to that result. Click elsewhere on the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- Keith Conrad, Proofs by Descent, §6, Lemma 6.4 (standard reference, not scraped)
- Evan Dummit, Number Theory (part 9): The Geometry of Numbers, §9.1.2, Lemma 2 (standard reference, not scraped)