How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
- AI-adapted: a semantically identical restatement of literature-sourced material, modulo indexing, notation, and boundary cases adopted by the library.
- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
is an abelian group, is a commutative monoid that is not a group, and its group of units is
Example
Let be the integers with the operations of Arithmetic on the integers. Then
- is an abelian group (Group and abelian group);
- is a commutative monoid (Semigroup and monoid) which is not a group, because has no multiplicative inverse;
- its group of units (The invertible elements of a monoid form a group under the restricted operation) is , and .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The integers with , , and (The integers as equivalence classes of pairs of naturals, Arithmetic on the integers), and the embedding of The naturals embed in the integers.
In : addition is associative and commutative, , and every has the additive inverse with ; multiplication is associative and commutative with , and it distributes over addition. These are the ring axioms, verified one by one in the proof of The integers form a commutative ring (The integers form a commutative ring, Arithmetic on the integers).
The order on is total, antisymmetric and transitive, is compatible with addition, and positives are closed under multiplication (The integers form a totally ordered ring, Order on the integers).
is injective, preserves addition, multiplication and order, and its image is exactly the nonnegative integers; and (The naturals embed in the integers).
On : every is a successor , so implies (Every nonzero natural number is a successor, Addition is commutative, Order on the natural numbers, The natural numbers (von Neumann)).
A group is a monoid in which every element is invertible; the units of a monoid form a group (Group and abelian group, Semigroup and monoid, Left inverse, right inverse, and invertible element of a monoid, Left identity, right identity, and two-sided identity for a binary operation, The invertible elements of a monoid form a group under the restricted operation).
Verification
Addition on is associative and commutative, and hence , and every has a two-sided additive inverse ; so is an abelian group.
Multiplication on is associative and commutative and ; so is a commutative monoid.
For every , : by distributivity , and adding gives .
in : is injective with and , and in since contains as an element while has none.
Discreteness in : if then . Indeed gives with , and since ; so in and, preserving the order, .
is not invertible in : for every . Hence is not a group.
and are units: , and because , so is the additive inverse of , which is .
If and then : from we get , so , either factor being possibly zero, and gives .
Let . Then and by step 1.3 and step 1.4. If and then , so , contradicting , which holds by step 1.4 and totality since ; the case , is the same with the names interchanged. So and are both positive or both negative.
Both positive: and by step 1.5, so by step 2.3, and with antisymmetry gives .
Both negative: then and and by ring arithmetic, so by step 3.1, that is .
By steps 2.2, 2.4, 3.1 and 4.1 the units of are exactly and ; and , since would give , while gives and hence . So , a group under multiplication with two elements.
Remarks
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The Statement of The integers form a commutative ring is quoted here by its content, not by its name. That theorem says is "a commutative ring with multiplicative identity", a phrase not defined at this point in the reading order; what is used above is the list of equations its proof verifies one at a time. Nothing here presupposes a definition of a ring.
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Cancellation without invertibility. satisfies cancellation by nonzero elements yet is not a group, and is a sharper example still, being cancellative outright (A commutative monoid in which cancellation holds need not be a group: ).
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is the first finite group in the library that is not trivial. It is cyclic of order , generated by .
Depends on
Group and abelian group
Semigroup and monoid
Left inverse, right inverse, and invertible element of a monoid
Left identity, right identity, and two-sided identity for a binary operation
The invertible elements of a monoid form a group under the restricted operation
The integers as equivalence classes of pairs of naturals
Arithmetic on the integers
Order on the integers
The integers form a commutative ring
The integers form a totally ordered ring
The naturals embed in the integers
Every nonzero natural number is a successor
Addition is commutative
Order on the natural numbers
The natural numbers (von Neumann)