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.
The well-ordering principle
Statement
Every nonempty subset has a least element: there is with for all .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: A nonempty subset . Define (informally, no element of is ).
Induction principle: a subset of that contains and is closed under equals (The principle of mathematical induction).
; consequently no satisfies (Discreteness: is the immediate successor).
Exactly one of , , holds (Trichotomy of the order on ); and (Discreteness: is the immediate successor).
is injective (Peano axiom P2) (The von Neumann naturals form a Peano system).
for all (the left successor law, Left successor law for addition).
for all (Left identity for addition).
Proof
Suppose is nonempty but has no least element.
If then : by [L2] applied to and we get , say ; then [L5], so by injectivity [L4], hence .
First, : if then for all , since [L6], making a least element, contrary to the assumption; hence ; moreover forces , because would give (as [L6] with ) while gives , and [L3] admits at most one of these; so every lies outside .
Next, is closed under : assume ; if then no satisfies (else by step 1.2, so because , a contradiction), hence for all by [L3], making a least element, contrary to the assumption; therefore , and any with satisfies or ; in the second case together with gives by the definition of the strict order, hence by step 1.2 and because , while in the first case ; so every lies outside , giving .
By the induction principle [L1], from and closure under , ; then for every , taking shows , so , contradicting nonemptiness; therefore has a least element.