Math 323

Please read this discussion of Lesson 1 (pdf document). (There were a few misprints in this discussion as originally posted. Corrections were made on Jan 27.)

The purpose of Lesson 1, and the discussion in class, and this online discussion, is to help you avoid the errors in negation which many students are still making when negating sentences with plural subjects or plural predicates.

A statement such as “all integers are not even” is ambiguous because of the placement of the “not”. Understanding this and related problems with the placement of “not” was the purpose of Lesson 1.  Thus, it should be obvious that if you are asked to give a (clear, unambiguous) negation of, for example, the statement “all integers are even”, you should NOT say that the negation is “all integers are not even” !

Please read the discussion of Lesson 1 (pdf document).

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