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.
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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.