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In the 10th century, the Iraqi mathematician Al-Hashimi worked with numbers as such, called "lines" but not necessarily considered as measurements of geometric objects, to prove algebraic propositions concerning multiplication, division, etc., including the existence of irrational numbers. [11]
One of the widely used types of impossibility proof is proof by contradiction.In this type of proof, it is shown that if a proposition, such as a solution to a particular class of equations, is assumed to hold, then via deduction two mutually contradictory things can be shown to hold, such as a number being both even and odd or both negative and positive.
One of many examples from algebraic geometry in the first half of the 20th century: Severi (1946) claimed that a degree-n surface in 3-dimensional projective space has at most (n+2 3 )−4 nodes, B. Segre pointed out that this was wrong; for example, for degree 6 the maximum number of nodes is 65, achieved by the Barth sextic , which is more ...
In mathematics and other fields, [a] a lemma (pl.: lemmas or lemmata) is a generally minor, proven proposition which is used to prove a larger statement. For that reason, it is also known as a "helping theorem" or an "auxiliary theorem".
A simpler, but related, problem is proof verification, where an existing proof for a theorem is certified valid. For this, it is generally required that each individual proof step can be verified by a primitive recursive function or program, and hence the problem is always decidable.
Convergence proof techniques are canonical patterns of mathematical proofs that sequences or functions converge to a finite limit when the argument tends to infinity.. There are many types of sequences and modes of convergence, and different proof techniques may be more appropriate than others for proving each type of convergence of each type of sequence.
In mathematics and logic, the term "uniqueness" refers to the property of being the one and only object satisfying a certain condition. [1] This sort of quantification is known as uniqueness quantification or unique existential quantification, and is often denoted with the symbols "∃!" [2] or "∃ =1". For example, the formal statement
To prove that π is transcendental, we prove that it is not algebraic. If π were algebraic, π i would be algebraic as well, and then by the Lindemann–Weierstrass theorem e π i = −1 (see Euler's identity) would be transcendental, a contradiction. Therefore π is not algebraic, which means that it is transcendental.