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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.
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 examples of mathematical fallacies there is some element of concealment or ...
As an illustration of this, the parity cycle (1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0) and its sub-cycle (1 1 0 0) are associated to the same fraction 5 / 7 when reduced to lowest terms. In this context, assuming the validity of the Collatz conjecture implies that (1 0) and (0 1) are the only parity cycles generated by positive whole numbers (1 and 2 ...
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 ...
In mathematics, Descartes' rule of signs, described by René Descartes in his La Géométrie, counts the roots of a polynomial by examining sign changes in its coefficients. The number of positive real roots is at most the number of sign changes in the sequence of polynomial's coefficients (omitting zero coefficients), and the difference ...
Universal generalization / instantiation. Existential generalization / instantiation. In propositional logic and Boolean algebra, De Morgan's laws, [ 1][ 2][ 3] also known as De Morgan's theorem, [ 4] are a pair of transformation rules that are both valid rules of inference. They are named after Augustus De Morgan, a 19th-century British ...
Proof by contradiction. In logic, proof by contradiction is a form of proof that establishes the truth or the validity of a proposition, by showing that assuming the proposition to be false leads to a contradiction . Although it is quite freely used in mathematical proofs, not every school of mathematical thought accepts this kind of ...