Basic of Logic

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Ryan$

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I would like to ask and sorry if it's trivial but for me I'm struggling every day to learn more and improve my logic.

Analogy to a real life case within my problem, if I have three cards with number A, and I've been asked how many recurring of number A I have? then my answer is twice, because the first A is the offset, and because we need the recurring of number A, then we have more twice of the offset card A, then my answer is 2 and not 3 so we are not including the first occurrence of A.

Am I right or should improve my logic?! thanks for your help guys.
 
"How many recurring of number A" is simply bad English and doesn't mean anything! And "How many times does the number A recur", while grammatically correct, is too ambiguous to appear in a math problem. If the problem asks "How many times does number A occur?" the answer is 3.
 
Ryan$ said:
I would like to ask and sorry if it's trivial but for me I'm struggling every day to learn more and improve my logic.

Analogy to a real life case within my problem, if I have three cards with number A, and I've been asked how many recurring of number A I have? then my answer is twice, because the first A is the offset, and because we need the recurring of number A, then we have more twice of the offset card A, then my answer is 2 and not 3 so we are not including the first occurrence of A.

Am I right or should improve my logic?! thanks for your help guys.
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If the question was:

How many times 'A' is repeated?

Then you could say that 'A' is repeated twice (but I feel uncomfortable with these types of ambiguous questions.)
 
First, we should note that we have no idea of what the actual problem is because ryan never gives us the exact words of an actual problem. He himself says it is an "analogy" to something "within" a problem

Second, this is not a question of logic, but of the meaning of the English word "recur." As Subhotosh already said, the word is a synonym of "repeat. If there are three instances, then there are two recurrences. There is nothing ambiguous about it.

Third, because we have no idea what words were actually used, what the context actually was, or whether the triggering problem even was in English, we have no clue whether this question is relevant to mathematics at all. It is quite possible that his search for some logic merely reflects his lack of understanding of English or his bungling of a translation from some other language into English.
 
If I had seen this thread before a number of members had replied, I would have bounced it back to Ryan$ because the question 'how many recurring of number A' cannot be answered and Ryan$ is unwilling to post the specific problem he's talking about.

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if I have four cards, which they are 1 2 5 2 , and asked me how many times the number of 2 is recurred? shouldn't I say 1? because after the first occurrence of 2, there's just one "2" .. so the answer should be 1 .
Am I wrong? if so then any explanation please?! according to our life meaning of recurring then it should be the answer 1 ..
 
You've already asked this, haven't you?

If the question was written in English, then it is poorly stated, because "recur" has a meaning that, while clear, is misleading in this context, where 2 occurs twice, but there is no distinct "primary occurrence" in contrast to the one recurrence. I think of it as psychological ambiguity -- we tend to wonder if the writer really meant what he literally said (one recurrence), or really meant to ask about the two occurrences. Therefore, it is better not to write this; and if asked, the appropriate thing to do is to ask what was intended.

In addition, if it was stated exactly as you say, then it is written in very poor English; we simply don't say "is recurred". So I'm guessing you translated from another language, in which case there is no sense in trying to answer you.

At any rate, your question is about English (maybe), not about math.
 
You should sign up for English Learners Stack Exchange, where I also tutor.

If you have the sequence 1, 2, 5, 2, then 2 occurs twice in the sequence and recurs once in the sequence. That is the meaning of the two verbs and is not a mathematical or logical issue. It is simply the result of the words' definitions.

However, it is not idiomatic, at least not in U.S. English, to use "recur" that way. We almost always give a number in terms of occurrences rather than recurrences. We would say idiomatically that "2" recurs in that sequence or "2" occurs twice.
 
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