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Buttered cat paradox: Humorous example of a paradox from contradicting proverbs. Intentionally blank page: Many documents contain pages on which the text "This page intentionally left blank" is printed, thereby making the page not blank. Metabasis paradox: Conflicting definitions of what is the best kind of tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics.
This category contains paradoxes in mathematics, but excluding those concerning informal logic. "Paradox" here has the sense of "unintuitive result", rather than "apparent contradiction". "Paradox" here has the sense of "unintuitive result", rather than "apparent contradiction".
One example is the Banach–Tarski paradox, a theorem widely considered to be nonintuitive. It states that it is possible to decompose a ball of a fixed radius into a finite number of pieces and then move and reassemble those pieces by ordinary translations and rotations (with no scaling) to obtain two copies from the one original copy.
In mathematical logic, Russell's paradox (also known as Russell's antinomy) is a set-theoretic paradox published by the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell in 1901. [1] [2] Russell's paradox shows that every set theory that contains an unrestricted comprehension principle leads to contradictions. [3]
Another veridical paradox with a concise mathematical proof is the birthday paradox. In 20th-century science, Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel or the Ugly duckling theorem are famously vivid examples of a theory being taken to a logical but paradoxical end.
Constance Reid included the paradox in the 1955 first edition of her popular mathematics book From Zero to Infinity, but removed it from later editions. [12] Martin Gardner presented the paradox as a "fallacy" in his Scientific American column in 1958, including it with six other "astonishing assertions" whose purported proofs were also subtly ...
An example of the apportionment paradox known as "the Alabama paradox" was discovered in the context of United States congressional apportionment in 1880, [1]: 228–231 when census calculations found that if the total number of seats in the House of Representatives were hypothetically increased, this would decrease Alabama's seats from 8 to 7.
In logic, Richard's paradox is a semantical antinomy of set theory and natural language first described by the French mathematician Jules Richard in 1905. The paradox is ordinarily used to motivate the importance of distinguishing carefully between mathematics and metamathematics .