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The concept of proof is formalized in the field of mathematical logic. [ 12] A formal proof is written in a formal language instead of natural language. A formal proof is a sequence of formulas in a formal language, starting with an assumption, and with each subsequent formula a logical consequence of the preceding ones.
Cantor's diagonal argument (among various similar names [ note 1]) is a mathematical proof that there are infinite sets which cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the infinite set of natural numbers – informally, that there are sets which in some sense contain more elements than there are positive integers.
Mathematical fallacy. In mathematics, certain kinds of mistaken proof are often exhibited, and sometimes collected, as illustrations of a concept called mathematical fallacy. There is a distinction between a simple mistake and a mathematical fallacy in a proof, in that a mistake in a proof leads to an invalid proof while in the best-known ...
Fermat–Catalan conjecture. In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem (sometimes called Fermat's conjecture, especially in older texts) states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2. The cases n = 1 and n = 2 have been known since antiquity to have infinitely many ...
The long real line pastes together ℵ 1 * + ℵ 1 copies of the real line plus a single point (here ℵ 1 * denotes the reversed ordering of ℵ 1) to create an ordered set that is "locally" identical to the real numbers, but somehow longer; for instance, there is an order-preserving embedding of ℵ 1 in the long real line but not in the real ...
This can be shown by setting √ N equal to the rational expression a/b with a and b being positive integers with no common prime factor, and squaring to obtain N = a 2 /b 2 and noting that since N is a positive integer b=1 so that N = a 2, a square number. In mathematics, proof by contrapositive, or proof by contraposition, is a rule of ...
Description. The simplest and most common form of mathematical induction infers that a statement involving a natural number n (that is, an integer n ≥ 0 or 1) holds for all values of n. The proof consists of two steps: The base case (or initial case ): prove that the statement holds for 0, or 1. The induction step (or inductive step, or step ...
Calculus, mathematical analysis, statistics, physics. In mathematics, the gamma function (represented by Γ, the capital letter gamma from the Greek alphabet) is one commonly used extension of the factorial function to complex numbers. The gamma function is defined for all complex numbers except the non-positive integers.