Articles on equational logic and teaching logic as a tool
- Information Processing Letters (IPL) 53, 3 (10 February 1995).
This special issue on the Calculational Method contains eight articles
that discuss equational logic or
use it heavily in different areas. Besides an editorial by guest editor
Roland Backhouse,
there are papers by Karger and Hoare, the Mathematics of Program
Construction Group in Eindhoven, the Eindhoven Tuesday Afternoon Club,
Dijkstra, Gries and Schneider, Kornerup, Leino, and Back and von Wright.
- Gries and Schneider.
Equational propositional logic.
IPL 53,
3 (February 1995), 145-152. This paper proves the soundness
and completeness of propositional logic E by relating
it to Church's logic P1.
- David Gries and Fred B. Schneider.
Teaching math more effectively through the design of
calculational proofs.
Tech. Rpt. 94-1415, March 1994.
Accepted for publication in the Mathematical Monthly.
- David Gries and Fred B. Schneider. A new approach to teaching mathematics.
PRIMUS V, 2 (June 1995), 114-115.
- David Gries. Teaching calculation and discrimination: a more effective
curriculum. Comm. ACM 34, 3 (March 1991), 44-55.
- David Gries.
On presenting monotonicity and on EA=>AE.
This tech report describes how to deal with monotonicity in
strengthening or weakening steps of a calculation, thus clarifying
a currently confusing issue. The approach used
here will be incorporated into the next edition of
A Logical Approach. This note also give a nice proof
of interchange of quantifications,
(Ex | R: (A y | S: P)) => (Ay | S: (E x | R: P)), using the idea of
a witness.
- David Gries and Fred B. Schneider.
Adding the
Everywhere Operator to Propositional Logic.
A sound and complete modal propositional logic is
presented in which "everywhere P has the interpretation
``P is true in all states''. The logic illustrates that the two
following approaches to axiomatizing a logic need not be equivalent:
(i) give axiom schemes that denote an infinite number of axioms and
(ii) write a finite number of axioms in terms of propositional variables
and introduce a substitution inference rule.
- David Gries.
Formal versus semiformal
proof in teaching predicate logic:
a reaction to Grantham's "Greek knuckleballs and
lucky charms".postscript.
Grantham proposes to teach predicate logic with "semiformal"
proofs. For the proofs of the theorems he uses as
examples (which are more involved than the usual ones one sees
in courses), we argue that formality and rigor makes the
development of and the presentation of the proofs shorter, clearer,
and easier.
- David Gries.
A calculational proof of Andrews's
challenge.postscript.
html.
Andrews's challenge is one of the more difficult
predicate-logic theorems that is used as a benchmark for
mechanical theorem provers. We offer a fairly simple proof
of it in the calculational style.
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