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The legal term probity means authority or credibility, the power of testimony to prove facts when given by persons of reputation or status. [6] Plausibility arguments using heuristic devices such as pictures and analogies preceded strict mathematical proof. [7]
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.
In logic and mathematics, a formal proof or derivation is a finite sequence of sentences (known as well-formed formulas when relating to formal language), each of which is an axiom, an assumption, or follows from the preceding sentences in the sequence, according to the rule of inference.
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".
With the development of formal logic, Hilbert asked whether it would be possible to prove that an axiom system is consistent by analyzing the structure of possible proofs in the system, and showing through this analysis that it is impossible to prove a contradiction. This idea led to the study of proof theory.
In most disciplines, evidence is required to prove something. Evidence is drawn from the experience of the world around us, with science obtaining its evidence from nature, [11] law obtaining its evidence from witnesses and forensic investigation, [12] and so on. A notable exception is mathematics, whose proofs are drawn from a mathematical ...
The consequence of these features is that a mathematical text is generally not understandable without some prerequisite knowledge. For example, the sentence "a free module is a module that has a basis" is perfectly correct, although it appears only as a grammatically correct nonsense, when one does not know the definitions of basis, module, and free module.
Proof without words of the Nicomachus theorem (Gulley (2010)) that the sum of the first n cubes is the square of the n th triangular number. In mathematics, a proof without words (or visual proof) is an illustration of an identity or mathematical statement which can be demonstrated as self-evident by a diagram without any accompanying explanatory text.