Gabor Toth's Glimpses of Algebra and Geometry contains the following beautiful proof (perhaps I should say "interpretation") of the formula , which I don't think I've ever seen before. Given a non-negative integer , let be the number of ordered pairs such that , i.e. the number of lattice points in the ball of radius . Then if is the number of ordered pairs such that , it follows that .
On the other hand, once one has characterized the primes which are a sums of squares, it's not hard to show that where is the number of divisors of congruent to . So we want to count the number of divisors of numbers less than or equal to congruent to for and take the difference. This gives
and now the desired result follows by dividing by and taking the limit.
Question: Does a similar proof exist of the formula ?
By "similar" I mean one first establishes a finitary result with a clear number-theoretic or combinatorial meaning and then takes a limit.
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