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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 ...
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, 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 ...
In abstract algebra and analysis, the Archimedean property, named after the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse, is a property held by some algebraic structures, such as ordered or normed groups, and fields. The property, as typically construed, states that given two positive numbers and , there is an integer such that .
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.
In mathematics, the set of positive real numbers, is the subset of those real numbers that are greater than zero. The non-negative real numbers, also include zero. Although the symbols and are ambiguously used for either of these, the notation or for and or for has also been widely employed, is aligned with the practice in algebra of denoting ...
In mathematics, an ordered field is a field together with a total ordering of its elements that is compatible with the field operations. Basic examples of ordered fields are the rational numbers and the real numbers, both with their standard orderings. Every subfield of an ordered field is also an ordered field in the inherited order.
Wilson's theorem. In algebra and number theory, Wilson's theorem states that a natural number n > 1 is a prime number if and only if the product of all the positive integers less than n is one less than a multiple of n. That is (using the notations of modular arithmetic ), the factorial satisfies. exactly when n is a prime number.