November 2015 – Page 5

Originally written by John Webb

tw: fictionalised statistics of disease rates.

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Today there are many tests that are widely used to detect life-threatening diseases early. How effective are they? Should they be believed?

At a routine checkup, your doctor tells you that there is a simple and inexpensive blood test that can detect a rare but particularly
nasty form of cancer. You agree to have the test done, and the doctor takes a blood sample and sends it off to the pathology laboratory.

Two days later the doctor calls to tell you that the test has come up positive. The good news is that the cancer can be cured since it
has been caught at an early stage. The bad news is that the treatment, though effective, is very expensive and has a number of unpleasant side-effects.

Before agreeing to treatment you need to do a little bit of basic arithmetic.…

Mathematically speaking, what is a contradiction?

The world of predicate logic interests me, especially how it provides a foundation for understanding the logic behind many mathematical proofs. It is interesting to know how the negation, contrapositive and inverse are defined with respect to some implication $A \Rightarrow B$ ( $A \wedge \neg B, \neg B \Rightarrow \neg A$ and $B \Rightarrow A$ respectively). What got me thinking about predicate logic again was when I asked myself, “What is a contradiction?”

My big Collins Dictionary and Thesaurus defines ‘contradict’ as “to declare the opposite of (a statement) to be true” (verbatim). But, this leaves some room for debate as the meaning of the word “opposite” is not logically clear. Is the negation true? Is the inverse true? My reasoning says that a contradiction of the above implication is defined as $A \Rightarrow \neg B$ . In a less formal way (and also less strongly), $A \not \Rightarrow B$ .

Let me briefly pause here for the sake of those unfamiliar with the symbols I have already used. $\neg$ denotes ‘not’, $\Rightarrow$ denotes ‘implies’, $\wedge$ denotes ‘and’, and A and B are symbols which represent a statement, such as “dogs are black” or “black animals are dogs”.…

A little medical statistics

Mathematically speaking, what is a contradiction?