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A formal expression is a kind of string of symbols, created by the same production rules as standard expressions, however, they are used without regard to the meaning of the expression. In this way, two formal expressions are considered equal only if they are syntactically equal, that is, if they are the exact same expression.
A sentence can be viewed as expressing a proposition, something that must be true or false. The restriction of having no free variables is needed to make sure that sentences can have concrete, fixed truth values : as the free variables of a (general) formula can range over several values, the truth value of such a formula may vary.
The following table lists many common symbols, together with their name, how they should be read out loud, and the related field of mathematics. Additionally, the subsequent columns contains an informal explanation, a short example, the Unicode location, the name for use in HTML documents, [ 1 ] and the LaTeX symbol.
3. Between two groups, may mean that the first one is a proper subgroup of the second one. > (greater-than sign) 1. Strict inequality between two numbers; means and is read as "greater than". 2. Commonly used for denoting any strict order. 3. Between two groups, may mean that the second one is a proper subgroup of the first one. ≤ 1.
Terms, informally, are expressions that represent objects from the domain of discourse. Any variable is a term. Any constant symbol from the signature is a term; an expression of the form f(t 1,...,t n), where f is an n-ary function symbol, and t 1,...,t n are terms, is again a term. The next step is to define the atomic formulas.
Mathematical logic is the study ... share the common property of considering only expressions in a fixed ... It says that a set of sentences has a model if and only ...
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).
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.