Frobenius's last proof
History and Overview
2019-04-16 v1 Combinatorics
Abstract
Around about 1917, Issai Schur rediscovered the Rogers-Ramanujan identities, and proved a system of polynomial identities that imply them. Schur wrote that Georg Frobenius (his former advisor) had shown him a simple, direct proof of these polynomial identities. Schur did not see fit to reveal Frobenius's proof, preferring his own rather complicated proof. But it is easy enough to guess what this `simple, direct' proof must have been. As Frobenius died in 1917, we may call this `Frobenius's last proof'.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1904.06573,
title = {Frobenius's last proof},
author = {Peter G. Doyle},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.06573},
year = {2019}
}
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Public domain