Square Numbers

Question

Lagrange's Theorem
A famous mathematician called Lagrange proved that every whole number could be written as the sum of 4 or fewer square numbers.

Examples:
19 = 16 + 1 + 1 + 1
35 = 25 + 9 + 1
47 = 36 + 9 + 1 + 1

What would 96 be?

Please help!!

Answer 1

The answer is 8²+4²+4². There's an applet on the internet that will do the decomposition for you for any positive integer: just google "Dario Alpern Lagrange" and click on the link at the bottom of the page to find it. It's very fast indeed.