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The concept of “character” in Dirichlet’s theorem on primes in an arithmetic progression
journal contribution
posted on 2013-06-28, 00:00 authored by Jeremy AvigadJeremy Avigad, Rebecca MorrisIn 1837, Dirichlet proved that there are infinitely many primes in any arithmetic progression in which the terms do not all share a common factor. We survey implicit and explicit uses ofDirichlet characters in presentations of Dirichlet’s proof in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an eye toward understanding some of the pragmatic pressures that shaped the evolution of modern mathematical method.