MATHEMATICAL PROOFS: A MATHEMATICIAN’S GREATEST DESIRE

Author: Jean Claude Ted Isidor

Editors: Yanxi

Chen

and

Jasleen Matharu

Artists: Tiffany Gao and Guanxin Li

Imagine that you are taking part in a test unlike any previous one. In this test, your answers will be distributed to the current and future test takers (meaning that if you mess up, there will be a lot of angry teenagers at your door) Nevertheless, you begin your exam, and things are looking in your favor until you hit that one question you have no clue how to solve. Panic seems to knock at your door once you realize that if you get this question wrong, everyone else gets it wrong too. Speeding up the story, you overcome the question and finish the exam, but your score turns out to be terrible, and as a result, generations of people fail the same test. Mathematicians are like artists in their lines of work, conjuring up revolutionary ideas that can affect future generations of mathematical work that stems from it However, unlike art, this property of mathematics, from building up from one idea to another, is precisely why having a solid foundation is essential, or else the entire thing will collapse. Hence, I present the concept of proofs, which can be advertised as “the wonder pill giving mathematicians a good night's sleep.”

Proofs can be defined as a series of steps written by a mathematician that demonstrates how they reached a new theorem, using previous ideas already deemed true To put it in perspective, proofs are the steel beams supporting skyscraper mathematics. So, it makes sense that mathematicians are adamant that the proofs for mathematical theorems are good. But to truly understand how proofs work, we must delve into the history behind proofs and understand how accredited with the first proof is the Thales of Mineaus. According to the research paper, “A history of mathematical proof: Ancient Greece to the Computer Age,” by David Bramelett Ph D , Thales' proof was that the diameter of a circle cuts a circle into two equal parts The theorem seems quite bland to most people, some may even argue that a child with a ball of playdough and a ruler would have proven the same.more logical as it showed how to reach a conclusion using currently accepted truths step by step. Following the mirroring the joy that comes from dandelions

However, Thale’s proof on diameters was Coming back to the Greeks for one last time, there is an unusual story on how the creation of a proof drove a group of