Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
A condition can be both necessary and sufficient. For example, at present, "today is the Fourth of July" is a necessary and sufficient condition for "today is Independence Day in the United States". Similarly, a necessary and sufficient condition for invertibility of a matrix M is that M has a nonzero determinant.
[2] [3] For a concrete example, consider the conditional statement "if an object is a square, then it has four sides". It is a necessary condition that an object has four sides if it is true that it is a square; conversely, the object being a square is a sufficient condition for it to be true that an object has four sides. [4]
The absence these conditions guarantees the outcome cannot occur, and no other condition can overcome the lack of this condition. Further, necessary conditions are not always sufficient. For example, AIDS necessitates HIV, but HIV does not always cause AIDS. In such instances, the condition demonstrates its necessity but lacks sufficiency.
Wherever logic is applied, especially in mathematical discussions, it has the same meaning as above: it is an abbreviation for if and only if, indicating that one statement is both necessary and sufficient for the other. This is an example of mathematical jargon (although, as noted above, if is more often used than iff in statements of definition).
Causes may sometimes be distinguished into two types: necessary and sufficient. [19] A third type of causation, which requires neither necessity nor sufficiency, but which contributes to the effect, is called a "contributory cause". Necessary causes If x is a necessary cause of y, then the presence of y necessarily implies the prior occurrence ...
If P and Q are "equivalent" statements, i.e. , it is possible to infer P under the condition Q. For example, the statements "It is August 13, so it is my birthday" and "It is my birthday, so it is August 13" are equivalent and both true consequences of the statement "August 13 is my birthday" (an abbreviated form of ).
For example, for a Gaussian distribution with unknown mean and variance, the jointly sufficient statistic, from which maximum likelihood estimates of both parameters can be estimated, consists of two functions, the sum of all data points and the sum of all squared data points (or equivalently, the sample mean and sample variance).
Necessary and sufficient condition, in logic, something that is a required condition for something else to be the case; Necessary proposition, in logic, a statement about facts that is either unassailably true (tautology) or obviously false (contradiction) Metaphysical necessity, in philosophy, a truth which is true in all possible worlds