Triangle inequality is an exterior angle of a right triangle and therefore larger than , meaning the other base angle of the isosceles triangle also is greater than and their sum exceeds in violation of the triangle postulate). This theorem establishing inequalities is sharpened by Pythagoras' theorem to the equality that the square of the length of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Consider a triangle whose sides are in an arithmetic progression and let the sides be , , . Then the triangle inequality requires that The first of these quadratic inequalities requires to
Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares version of the statement (in which he also gave the number of possible expressions of the powers of "p" as a sum of two squares) in a letter to Marin Mersenne dated December 25, 1640: for this reason this version of the theorem is sometimes called "Fermat's Christmas theorem." Since the Diophantus identity implies that the product of two integers each of which can be written as the sum of two squares is itself expressible as the sum of two squares, by applying Fermat's theorem to the prime factorization of any positive integer "n", we see that if all the