15 Nov
2011
15 Nov
'11
9:56 a.m.
="Henry Baker" <hbaker1@pipeline.com> Aren't most proofs of the "intermediate value theorem" essentially non-constructive?
I again apologize for not being clear what I was asking for--I buried the second half of the conjunction too deeply in the prose:
=Marc LeBrun ... a non-constructive proof... that ALSO has an easily-verified case?
Come to think of it factoring provides an example: you can easily and non-constructively show that some big N is composite, AND you can easily verify that some X divides N, BUT finding X is hard. Thanks for all the suggestions!