I was first presented with a proof by contradiction while I was studying Discrete event systems in Canada. And I was puzzled about it most day. I came to really like it though.
When we want to prove something by contradiction we assume that the statement we want to prove is false and then show that it leads to a logic contradiction at some point, therefore the statement must be true. Don’t be confused just yet. I will come to the examples.
Proof by contradiction is not limited to conditional statements like the the direct proof is. So we don’t need to have a proposition on the form if Q then P. Continue reading →