Talk:provar por A + B

RFV discussion: March–May 2014
The unabbreviated form, provar por A mais B, is easily attestable, but I only found 2 cites for this.— Ungoliant (falai) 19:43, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Why would we keep it at all, even if it is attestable? To "prove by A plus B" and "prouver par A plus B" are also attestable, as are probably similar sentences in many languages but we aren't going to have them, are we? --Hekaheka (talk) 15:56, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It’s idiomatic in Portuguese. — Ungoliant (falai) 18:54, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Looks like standard mathematics phrasing. I'm confused -- how is this idiomatic?  &#8209;&#8209; Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:58, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It can be used in any context. For example, the first page of Google Books hits include proving that the reason you missed work was because you were sick, proving who really wrote a song, proving you love someone, proving someone is a surrealist, proving a program is better than the others, proving how tyrannical someone’s heart is, etc. — Ungoliant (falai) 19:09, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Looks can be deceiving — "to prove by A + B" has no unambiguous mathematical meaning; it all depends on what "A", "B" and "+" are. If a proof literally relies merely on adding two numbers, a mathematician would not write "prove by A + B", but "the proof is left as an exercise for the reader". So if this is attestable, I expect most uses to be figurative and unrelated to mathematics. Keφr 19:12, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Failed. — Ungoliant (falai) 05:01, 24 May 2014 (UTC)