maths

Proof Differences

How do we teach proof techniques to students who have not had any exposure to proofs before? There are (at least) two things to emphasise, I think: A proof is a piece of literature. Proofs of the same fact will look differently, depending on the audience. To illustrate this, consider the following example from algebra. Let $S$ be a set and $\cdot$ be an operation on $S$, i.