Uniqueness for sums of nonvanishing squares

Published in Integers, 2020

Recommended citation: N. Kosovalic and B. Pigott, "Uniqueness for sums of nonvanishing squares." Integers. 20 (2020). http://math.colgate.edu/~integers/u93/u93.pdf

We address the issue of uniqueness for sums of nonvanishing squares; that is, we determine all positive integers N that can be represented as a sum of k ≥ 5 nonvanishing squares in essentially only one way. Our methods are elementary and are based on a lower bound on the number of 1s that must be present in such a representation.

Download paper here

N. Kosovalic and B. Pigott, "Uniqueness for sums of nonvanishing squares." Integers. 20 (2020).