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Primitives (undefined terms) are the most basic ideas. Typically they include objects and relationships. In geometry, the objects are things like points, lines and planes while a fundamental relationship is that of incidence – of one object meeting or joining with another. The terms themselves are undefined.
Contrast the term primitive notion, which is a core concept not defined in terms of other concepts. Primitive notions are used as building blocks to define other concepts. Contrast also the term undefined behavior in computer science, in which the term indicates that a function may produce or return any result, which may or may not be correct.
Alfred Tarski explained the role of primitive notions as follows: [4]. When we set out to construct a given discipline, we distinguish, first of all, a certain small group of expressions of this discipline that seem to us to be immediately understandable; the expressions in this group we call PRIMITIVE TERMS or UNDEFINED TERMS, and we employ them without explaining their meanings.
The object of thought is deductive reasoning (simple proofs), which the student learns to combine to form a system of formal proofs (Euclidean geometry). Learners can construct geometric proofs at a secondary school level and understand their meaning. They understand the role of undefined terms, definitions, axioms and theorems in
In Euclidean geometry, similarity is used to describe objects that have the same shape, while congruence is used to describe objects that are the same in both size and shape. [69] Hilbert, in his work on creating a more rigorous foundation for geometry, treated congruence as an undefined term whose properties are defined by axioms.
A good example is the relative consistency of absolute geometry with respect to the theory of the real number system. Lines and points are undefined terms (also called primitive notions) in absolute geometry, but assigned meanings in the theory of real numbers in a way that is consistent with both axiom systems. [citation needed]