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.
If and then and ; hence the set of divisors of a nonzero integer is bounded above by
Statement
Let with (Divisibility in : when for some integer ) and . Then and
Consequently, for the set of divisors of is bounded above by : every divisor of satisfies .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: Integers and with for some and ; and the embedding , , of The naturals embed in the integers.
is a commutative ring: addition and multiplication are associative and commutative, , , , multiplication distributes over addition, and every has an additive inverse ; we write for (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; means together with (The integers form a totally ordered ring, Order on the integers).
is injective, preserves addition, multiplication and order, and its image is exactly the set of nonnegative integers; and (The naturals embed in the integers, The integers as equivalence classes of pairs of naturals).
On : if and only if (Discreteness: is the immediate successor); (The natural numbers (von Neumann)); and for every , since (Order on the natural numbers).
; exactly when ; ; and (Absolute value in : ; exactly when ; ; ; ; and exactly when , The absolute value of an integer).
means for some (Divisibility in : when for some integer ).
Proof
Write . If then , and if then ; both contradict , so and .
If and then : if or then , and otherwise and , so because positives are closed under multiplication.
Discreteness of : if then . Indeed , so for some ; because ; hence in , so , and applying , which preserves the order, gives .
, and because and , the latter since .
Hence , so by compatibility of the order with addition.
Since and , the product is nonnegative, and it equals by distributivity; adding gives .
Finally, every divisor of satisfies and , hence by transitivity: is an upper bound for the set of divisors of .
Remarks
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There is no excluded case at . The hypothesis is , and the conclusion derives rather than assuming it: forces (Divisibility in : when for some integer ), so a zero divisor simply cannot occur under this hypothesis. The statement is therefore not vacuous anywhere, and it is not silently excluding a case.
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The hypothesis cannot be dropped. Every integer divides , so the divisors of are all of and are bounded neither above nor below. This is exactly why the greatest common divisor of has to be fixed by a convention rather than by a maximum (Common divisor, and the greatest common divisor , with the convention ).
Depends on
Divisibility in : when for some integer
The absolute value of an integer
Absolute value in : ; exactly when ; ; ; ; and exactly when
Order on the integers
The integers form a commutative ring
The integers form a totally ordered ring
The naturals embed in the integers
Discreteness: is the immediate successor
The natural numbers (von Neumann)
Order on the natural numbers
The integers as equivalence classes of pairs of naturals
Arithmetic on the integers