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P. Oxy. 29, one of the oldest surviving fragments of Euclid's Elements, a textbook used for millennia to teach proof-writing techniques. The diagram accompanies Book II, Proposition 5. [1] A mathematical proof is a deductive argument for a mathematical statement, showing that the stated assumptions logically guarantee the
It is an important proof technique in set theory, topology and other fields. Proofs by transfinite induction typically distinguish three cases: when n is a minimal element, i.e. there is no element smaller than n; when n has a direct predecessor, i.e. the set of elements which are smaller than n has a largest element;
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 ...
Fermat's little theorem and some proofs; Gödel's completeness theorem and its original proof; Mathematical induction and a proof; Proof that 0.999... equals 1; Proof that 22/7 exceeds π; Proof that e is irrational; Proof that π is irrational; Proof that the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges
In higher branches of mathematics, such as analysis and linear algebra the commutativity of well-known operations (such as addition and multiplication on real and complex numbers) is often used (or implicitly assumed) in proofs.
A proof, then, laid out in accordance with the Suppes–Lemmon notation style, [43] is a sequence of lines containing sentences, [38] where each sentence is either an assumption, or the result of applying a rule of proof to earlier sentences in the sequence. [38]
A literal is a propositional variable or the negation of a propositional variable. Two literals are said to be complements if one is the negation of the other (in the following, is taken to be the complement to ). The resulting clause contains all the literals that do not have complements. Formally:
To illustrate how one can convert a natural deduction to the axiomatic form of proof, we apply it to the tautology Q→((Q→R)→R). In practice, it is usually enough to know that we could do this. We normally use the natural-deductive form in place of the much longer axiomatic proof. First, we write a proof using a natural-deduction like method: