3 ms·
Nicely said. Bear in mind though that logic books and their proofs generally rely on a 'stack' as well. You prove a theorem and then you're able to use that t
by grovulent 12y ago
Nicely said.
Bear in mind though that logic books and their proofs generally rely on a 'stack' as well. You prove a theorem and then you're able to use that theorem in your proofs going forward - with the theorem itself being used as the justification.
From a pedagogical standpoint - the act of writing that justification is enormously valuable since the book will also have an index where you can quickly look up a theorem if you've forgotten the basics of it.
Perhaps the difference is more in the fact that maths textbooks will often rely on theorems proved in other mathematical contexts (where it doesn't make sense to provide the proof in the context currently being explored). The problem being that there can be no reliable way to index that information. Logic textbooks, however, present systems that are much more self-contained (if not completely).
- mikevm 12y agoWhen I took Logic for CS we were taught the Natural Deduction proof calculus, which mirrors the kind of proofs we do in maths. We had an exercise during the course to write out which ND inference rules were used in every step of some natural language math proof, and it really shows you how one sentence can pack 10 or more inference rules if you try to unpack it! He also put a similar question on the test which had you first prove a theorem using natural language, and then you had to find the use of ND inference rules in your proof (that wasn't easy... even though you wrote the proof yourself).