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Re:What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (1895) by phaemon on Saturday September 27, 2014 @01:45PM (#8377660)
Euclid's proof isn't a proof by contradiction. As the wikipedia page says:

>"Euclid is often erroneously reported to have proved this result by contradiction"

It simply says that if you are constructing a list of primes, you can always add one more to the list, therefore there are infinitely many.

Re:What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (1895) by tjgq on Sunday September 28, 2014 @11:22AM (#8379948)
The overall structure of the proof is not by contradiction, but one of the steps is. The Wikipedia article calls this out, right after the sentence you quoted.
Re:What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (1895) by lutusp on Sunday September 28, 2014 @12:44PM (#8380182)
Also, even though it's correct that Euclid didn't pose it as a proof by contradiction, it can certainly be posed that way, and I often use that form when presenting it to nonmathematicians.
Re:What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (1895) by tjgq on Sunday September 28, 2014 @02:26PM (#8380496)
Not everyone thinks the same way. There are certainly lay persons out there who do not find proofs by contradiction jarring when they come across them for the first time. I remember I was one of them.

But the impression I get from my (possibly biased) sample is that most non-trained people intuitively see proof by contradiction (or any form of nonconstructive proof, really) as a way of "cheating", because it asserts something does or does not exist without actually producing a (counter)example. YMMV, of course.