I stumbled upon this problem when taking Stanford's Intro to Logic Course. Wikipedia shows some proofs to the contraposition ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition ) but I couldn't fit any of ...
How should you respond to a student who asks whether a very nice physical example constitutes a proof? [closed]
"Is this really a proof?" is the exact question e-mailed to me today from an undergraduate mathematics student whom I know as a highly competent student. The one sentence question was accompanied with ...
Perhaps the "proofs" of ABC conjecture or newly released weak version of twin prime conjecture or alike readily come to your mind. These are not the proofs I am looking for. Indeed my question was ...
the 2005 AMS article/survey on experimental mathematics by Bailey/Borwein mentions many remarkable successes in the field including new formulas for $\pi$ that were discovered via the PSLQ ...
I was wondering what role non-rigorous, heuristic type arguments play in rigorous math. Are there examples of rigorous, formal proofs in which a non-rigorous reasoning still plays a central part? ...
I do not know exactly how to characterize the class of proofs that interests me, so let me give some examples and say why I would be interested in more. Perhaps what the examples have in common is ...