On 26 October 2010 19:29, Andrew Coppin
I don't even know the difference between a proposition and a predicate.
A proposition is an abstraction from sentences, the idea being that e.g. "Snow is white", "Schnee ist weiß" and "La neige est blanche" are all sentences expressing the same proposition. Propositional logic is quite a simple logic, where the building blocks are atomic formulae and the usual logical connectives. An example of a well-formed formula might be "P → Q". It tends to be the first system taught to undergraduates, while the second is usually the first-order predicate calculus, which introduces predicates and quantifiers. Predicates are usually interpreted as properties; we might write "P(x)" or "Px" to indicate that object x has the property P.
I also don't know exactly what "discrete mathematics" actually covers.
Discrete mathematics is concerned with mathematical structures which are discrete, rather than continuous. Real analysis, for example, is concerned with real numbers—"the continuum"—and thus would not be covered. Graph theory, on the other hand, concerns objects (nodes and edges) which have sharp cutoffs—if an edge directly connects two nodes, there are no intermediate nodes, whereas if you consider an interval between any two real numbers, no matter how close, there are more real numbers between them. Computers being the kind of things they are, discrete mathematics has a certain obvious utility. Benedict.