Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning

• Text: How to Read and Do Proofs: An Introduction to Mathematical Thought Processes
• Author: Daniel Solow
• Publisher: Wiley
• ISBN-10: 0471680583
• ISBN-13: 978-0471680581

Look up your grades

Topics

1. Proof that the square root of 2 is irrational.
2. The Forward-Backward Method
   • Geometric results.
3. Mathematical terminology
4. Propositional Logic
   • Quantifiers
5. The Construction Method
6. The Choose Method
7. Specialization

There will be 3 hour-long exams on the Mondays of week 3, 6, and 9. There will be a final exam that will be counted twice. The lowest of the 5 exam-grades will be dropped.

Homework

1. Due 9/28: the last part of problem 2.22 on page 22 in the text.

Lecture Notes

• Lecture notes in PDF form
• PDF files of previous exams

Links

• SWI Prolog Home Page
  An excellent free implementation of Prolog
• Otter Home page
  Otter is a free generalized theorem proving system (somewhat user-hostile)
• Solution to the Fibonacci Recurrence
  This is in MathML, so you must use the Mozilla browser to view it.