Basel problem

Uncommon card · No. 100298

The Basel problem is a problem in mathematical analysis with relevance to number theory, concerning an infinite sum of inverse squares. It was first posed by Pietro Mengoli in 1650 and solved by Leonhard Euler in 1734, and read on 5 December 1735 in The Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Since the problem had withstood the attacks of the leading mathematicians of the day, Euler's solution brought him immediate fame when he was twenty-eight. Euler generalised the problem considerably, and his ideas were taken up more than a century later by Bernhard Riemann in his seminal 1859 paper "On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude", in which he defined the Riemann zeta function and proved its basic properties. The problem is named after the city of Basel, hometown of Euler as well as of the Bernoulli family who unsuccessfully attacked the problem. The Basel problem asks for the precise summation of the reciprocals of the squares of the natural numbers, i.e. the precise sum of the...

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