Logical functions through pictures

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Our introduction to basic logic emphasizes these mathematical functions that have truth values as their inputs and a truth value as their result. They can also be referred to as truth functions or logical functions.

Untrue: “not”

Symbol: not
Plain text: not

The simplest of these functions is called not, also known as negation. Negation provides a way to talk about things that do not have a certain property, ones that are not in a certain set, or where the value of a predicate is false. In our logic, these are all just different ways of expressing the same idea.

The next group of pictures illustrate negation. The parts of the pictures in the first group that were green, or blue, or yellow are white in this group. The areas that were white in the first group of pictures are marked here with stripes, indicating that in the original picture they had the property of being not green, not blue, or not yellow.

So every point that was colored (true) in the first set of pictures is white (false) here and each point that was white (false) in the first set is shaded (true) here. In Prooftoys not is a function that takes true or false as its input and produces a value of true or false. This behavior can be defined with a table. You can look up the value of not x by going to the row labeled with the value of x, either true or false.

To use the table, look up the row labeled with the value of the input “X”. The value of the function is in that row under “not X”. So (not false) = true and (not true) = false. Moving the mouse over one of these pictures or touching it on a touch screen will cause the truth table entries to highlight.

This kind of table that shows the truth value produced by true or false inputs to a function is called a truth table. The entries where the value is true are shaded with blue lines to highlight the difference between true and false. We will use this color scheme in other truth tables as well.

In our notation we write the property of not being blue as not(blue x) or (not(blue x)). We can also read this as saying that the predicate blue is not true for x, or that x is not in the set of things that are blue. In mathematics a statement like not(A x) is commonly called the negation of a statement (A x). The negated statement is true of all the things where theoriginal statement (A x) is false.

Another notation sometimes used for negation is “~”.

At least one true: “or”

Symbol: |
Plain text: or

As an example of our next function, suppose you are thinking what to have for lunch, and decide it must either be delicious or easy. In the first picture let circle D represent things that are delicious and circle E represent things that are easy. The combined area then represents things that are delicious or easy. We can write that a thing x is “delicious or easy” as (D x) | (E x). Everything in the parts of the picture that are shaded have this property.

The shaded part of the second picture also represents things that are delicious or easy, this time using the same shading for all of them instead of separate shadings for D and E.

All areas of the first picture that are shaded yellow or green are shaded blue in the second picture. Once again we can use a function to model this relationship. This function has two inputs. Each input value is boolean (true or false) and so is the result. Again, hover the mouse over either of the pictures to highlight the appropriate parts of the truth table for the function named or (|).

This truth table is organized with a row for each value of the first input and a column for each value of the second input. The value of the function is in the row for the value of the first input and the column for the value of the second input. So for example (false | true) == true.

Both true: “and”

Symbol: &
Plain text: &

Suppose you are feeling more picky about your lunch, and decide it must be both delicious and easy. Only things in both of the circles fit this description – the small shaded area in the next picture. In Prooftoys we write ((D x) & (E x)).

Once again, at each point “x” in the picture, ((D x) & (E x)) is true exactly when (D x) is true and (E x) is also true. We can define a function with this truth table:

What if there is nothing that is both easy and delicious? A picture for that situation could like this:

The picture has no shaded area because region D and region E do not overlap; there is no part of the picture where (D x) and (E x) are both true. If that really is your requirement, in this scenario there is no possible lunch for you!

Equality: “equivalent”

Symbol: ==
Plain text: ==

A simple yet important property of truth values is equality. In this case we will give the truth table immediately:

It shows that true is equal to true, false is equal to false, and neither one is equal to the other, all as you would expect. The notation shown here is specific to boolean values, but Prooftoys also permits simply =.

➪ Next: True statements through pictures