Handbook Of Mathematical Induction

Handbook of Mathematical Induction

Handbook of Mathematical Induction: Theory and Applications shows how to find and write proofs via mathematical induction. This comprehensive book covers the theory, the structure of the written proof, all standard exercises, and hundreds of application examples from nearly every area of mathematics. In the first part of the book, the author discusses different inductive techniques, including well-ordered sets, basic mathematical induction, strong induction, double induction, infinite descent, downward induction, and several variants. He then introduces ordinals and cardinals, transfinite induction, the axiom of choice, Zorn’s lemma, empirical induction, and fallacies and induction. He also explains how to write inductive proofs. The next part contains more than 750 exercises that highlight the levels of difficulty of an inductive proof, the variety of inductive techniques available, and the scope of results provable by mathematical induction. Each self-contained chapter in this section includes the necessary definitions, theory, and notation and covers a range of theorems and problems, from fundamental to very specialized. The final part presents either solutions or hints to the exercises. Slightly longer than what is found in most texts, these solutions provide complete details for every step of the problem-solving process.

Handbook Mathematics

An Introduction to Proof Theory

"Proof theory is a central area of mathematical logic of special interest to philosophy . It has its roots in the foundational debate of the 1920s, in particular, in Hilbert's program in the philosophy of mathematics, which called for a formalization of mathematics, as well as for a proof, using philosophically unproblematic, "finitary" means, that these systems are free from contradiction. Structural proof theory investigates the structure and properties of proofs in different formal deductive systems, including axiomatic derivations, natural deduction, and the sequent calculus. Central results in structural proof theory are the normalization theorem for natural deduction, proved here for both intuitionistic and classical logic, and the cut-elimination theorem for the sequent calculus. In formal systems of number theory formulated in the sequent calculus, the induction rule plays a central role. It can be eliminated from proofs of sequents of a certain elementary form: every proof of an atomic sequent can be transformed into a "simple" proof. This is Hilbert's central idea for giving finitary consistency proofs. The proof requires a measure of proof complexity called an ordinal notation. The branch of proof theory dealing with mathematical systems such as arithmetic thus has come to be called ordinal proof theory. The theory of ordinal notations is developed here in purely combinatorial terms, and the consistency proof for arithmetic presented in detail"--