"The sum of three and five is eight."
Translation:Suma trzech i pięciu to osiem.
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"Suma trzech i pięciu to osiem" vs "Sumą trzech i pięciu jest osiem".
It's our usual "X is Y" sentence, but turned around, to "Y is X" because it seems pretty probable here - in fact, it makes more sense to put "osiem" in the end as this is like a maths equation and therefore "eight" is the 'new information'.
Also: Eight is 'a sum', but it's hard to say that 'the sum' is 'an eight', so you wouldn't put eight in Instrumental.
In a sentence like:
[noun in nominative] jest/są [noun in instrumental]
you need to make sure that the nominative noun is a subset of the instrumental noun.
8 is a possible sum. If you add different numbers together, you'll potentially get a different sum. But those will all be sums, hence the number 8 is one possible subset of the term 'sum'. Therefore the noun 'sum' must take the instrumental case, whereas '8' stays in nominative.