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Conjectural history is a type of historiography isolated in the 1790s by Dugald Stewart, who termed it "theoretical or conjectural history," as prevalent in the historians and early social scientists of the Scottish Enlightenment. As Stewart saw it, such history makes space for speculation about causes of events, by postulating natural causes ...
An axiom, postulate, or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word ἀξίωμα (axíōma), meaning 'that which is thought worthy or fit' or 'that which commends itself as evident'.
In mathematics, a conjecture is a conclusion or a proposition that is proffered on a tentative basis without proof. [1] [2] [3] Some conjectures, such as the Riemann hypothesis or Fermat's conjecture (now a theorem, proven in 1995 by Andrew Wiles), have shaped much of mathematical history as new areas of mathematics are developed in order to ...
The Pythagorean theorem has at least 370 known proofs. [1]In mathematics and formal logic, a theorem is a statement that has been proven, or can be proven. [a] [2] [3] The proof of a theorem is a logical argument that uses the inference rules of a deductive system to establish that the theorem is a logical consequence of the axioms and previously proved theorems.
The compactness theorem first appeared as a lemma in Gödel's proof of the completeness theorem, and it took many years before logicians grasped its significance and began to apply it routinely. It says that a set of sentences has a model if and only if every finite subset has a model, or in other words that an inconsistent set of formulas must ...
A mathematical assertion is considered as truth only if it is a theorem that is proved from true premises by means of a sequence of syllogisms (inference rules), the premises being either already proved theorems or self-evident assertions called axioms or postulates.
In mathematical logic, a theory (also called a formal theory) is a set of sentences in a formal language.In most scenarios a deductive system is first understood from context, after which an element of a deductively closed theory is then called a theorem of the theory.
The definition of a formal proof is intended to capture the concept of proofs as written in the practice of mathematics. The soundness of this definition amounts to the belief that a published proof can, in principle, be converted into a formal proof. However, outside the field of automated proof assistants, this is rarely done in practice.