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.
Sine, Cosine, and the Definition of Pi: Examples and Counterexamples
1 · Prerequisites
- Absolute and Conditional Convergence; Rearrangement; Products
- Binary Operations, Monoids, Groups and Subgroups
- Compactness in Metric Spaces
- Completeness, Completion, and Uniform Continuity
- Construction of the Natural Numbers
- Construction of the Real Numbers via Cauchy Sequences
- Construction of the Real Numbers via Dedekind Cuts
- Continuity, IVT, EVT, and Uniform Continuity
- Countability and Uncountability
- Foundations of the Real Numbers for Analysis
- Limits of Real Functions
- limsup, liminf, and Subsequential Limits
- Metric Spaces
- Monotone Functions, Discontinuities, and Continuity Sets
- Monotone Sequences, Bolzano-Weierstrass, and Cauchy Completeness
- Order, Zorn's Lemma, and the Axiom of Choice
- Power Series and Real-Analytic Functions
- Properties of the Integral and the Working FTC
- Relations, Functions, and Quotients
- Roots, Rational Powers, and Classical Inequalities
- Sequences and Limits
- Sequences and Series of Functions; Uniform Convergence
- Series: Convergence and the Nonnegative Tests
- Sine, Cosine, and the Definition of Pi
- Suprema and Infima
- The Derivative and the Mean Value Theorems
- The Riemann Integral: Definition and Integrability
- The ZFC Axioms and the Basic Set Constructions
- Topology of ℝ
- Vector Spaces, Linear Subspaces, Span and Direct Sums
2 · Summary
3 · Logical flowchart
4 · Definitions, theorems and proofs
None yet.
5 · Examples, counterexamples and false statements
The Bartle-Sherbert bounds 2.828 < pi < 3.185
Example
Let . Then
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The first positive cosine zero .
is strictly decreasing on , with unique zero (Pi as twice the smallest positive zero of cosine, Sine is positive and cosine is strictly decreasing on (0,2), with cos 2 at most -1/3).
The cosine power series and alternating-series remainder bounds are those of Sine and cosine defined by their real power series and The alternating series test: if is nonincreasing with then converges, the sum lies between any two consecutive partial sums, and the error after terms is at most .
Nonnegative square roots exist and preserve comparisons after squaring (Square roots exist: a unique with ; the positives are ).
Verification
At , the first two cosine terms cancel and the alternating tail beginning with is positive, so .
Put . Then , and the remaining alternating cosine tail begins negative with decreasing absolute terms, so .
Strict decrease and [L1] give .
Since , . Since and , one has , hence .
Doubling the bounds of step 2.1 proves the displayed decimal bounds for .
sin(1/x) has no limit as x tends to zero
Statement refuted
The function , defined for , has a limit at .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The punctured real line.
A function limit implies convergence along every sequence in its punctured domain approaching the point (Heine criterion: iff for every sequence in converging to ).
Reciprocal natural-number sequences tend to zero (For every in a complete ordered field there is a natural with ).
Counterexample
For , put and . Both sequences are nonzero and tend to .
Their image values are and .
A common function limit at zero would force both image sequences to converge to it, which is impossible.
x sin(1/x) tends to zero despite its oscillation
Example
where the function is defined at by the displayed limit.
Facts & Assumptions
Given: A nonzero real approaching .
for every real (Parity and the Pythagorean identity for sine and cosine).
The squeeze theorem for function limits holds (If near and and have the same limit at , then so does ).
Verification
From [L1], for every .
Since both and tend to , squeeze gives .
The extension of x^2 sin(1/x) by zero is differentiable but its derivative is discontinuous at zero
Example
Define and for . Then is differentiable on , with , but is not continuous at .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The function of the statement.
, , and the quarter-turn values of sine/cosine hold (Parity and the Pythagorean identity for sine and cosine, The derivatives of sine and cosine are cosine and minus sine, Quarter-turn values and shifts by pi/2 and pi).
The chain and derivative-algebra rules, and the derivative definition, hold (The chain rule, in one line from Carathéodory: if is differentiable at and is differentiable at , then is differentiable at with , Sums, scalar multiples, products and quotients: , , , and when , The derivative of at a point that is a limit point of , and differentiability on a set).
A function limit implies the same limit along every punctured convergent sequence (Heine criterion: iff for every sequence in converging to ).
Verification
The difference quotient at zero is , whose absolute value is at most ; hence .
For , product and chain rules give .
Along , the derivative tends to ; along , it tends to .
Both sequences tend to zero, so [L3] shows that has no limit at zero and is not continuous there.
A sector-area squeeze proves lim sin(x)/x=1 without first calibrating angle measure
Statement
False claim: the sector-area inequalities prove without any prior calibration of the angle variable to arc length, sector area, and .
Facts & Assumptions
Given: The analytic sine function and the definition from the first positive cosine zero.
The analytic proof already establishes (The limit of sin x divided by x at zero is one).
is defined analytically from cosine, not from geometric sector area (Pi as twice the smallest positive zero of cosine).
Refutation
The sector inequality uses an angle measured in radians, and its usual derivation identifies that measure through arc length or sector area in the unit circle.
Establishing that identification requires a normalization constant, equivalently the relationship between the geometric full turn and the analytic of [L2].
Thus the sector argument cannot be used as a foundation independent of that calibration; it may prove the limit only after importing the relation whose analytic construction it was meant to justify.
The limit itself remains true by [L1], but the claimed independent proof is false.
Sources
Standard references
Recommended treatments; not extraction sources.