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Jargon often appears in lectures, and sometimes in print, as informal shorthand for rigorous arguments or precise ideas. Much of this uses common English words, but with a specific non-obvious meaning when used in a mathematical sense. Some phrases, like "in general", appear below in more than one section.
In mathematics, certain kinds of mistaken proof are often exhibited, and sometimes collected, as illustrations of a concept called mathematical fallacy.There is a distinction between a simple mistake and a mathematical fallacy in a proof, in that a mistake in a proof leads to an invalid proof while in the best-known examples of mathematical fallacies there is some element of concealment or ...
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 27 September 2024. Observation that in many real-life datasets, the leading digit is likely to be small Not to be confused with the unrelated adage Benford's law of controversy. The distribution of first digits, according to Benford's law. Each bar represents a digit, and the height of the bar is the ...
In proof by exhaustion, the conclusion is established by dividing it into a finite number of cases and proving each one separately. The number of cases sometimes can become very large. For example, the first proof of the four color theorem was a proof by exhaustion with 1,936 cases. This proof was controversial because the majority of the cases ...
More broadly, proof by contradiction is any form of argument that establishes a statement by arriving at a contradiction, even when the initial assumption is not the negation of the statement to be proved. In this general sense, proof by contradiction is also known as indirect proof, proof by assuming the opposite, [2] and reductio ad impossibile.
For numberings of the set of computable functions, see Numbering (computability theory). In mathematical logic, a Gödel numbering is a function that assigns to each symbol and well-formed formula of some formal language a unique natural number, called its Gödel number. The concept was developed by Kurt Gödel for the proof of his ...
Glossary of mathematical symbols. A mathematical symbol is a figure or a combination of figures that is used to represent a mathematical object, an action on mathematical objects, a relation between mathematical objects, or for structuring the other symbols that occur in a formula. As formulas are entirely constituted with symbols of various ...
A list of articles about numbers (not about numerals). Topics include powers of ten, notable integers, prime and cardinal numbers, and the myriad system.