probvious
probvious adjective: able to be shown to hold with very high confidence via heuristic arguments, but not formally provable.
Adjective
probvious (not comparable)
- Able to be shown to hold with very high confidence via heuristic arguments, but not formally provable.
- For the Collatz conjecture, as written in condensed form, the map is scaling by 1#47;2 or 3#47;2 with equal probability, so the expected growth factor is #92;sqrt#123;3#47;4#125;lt;1}. Thus, we may argue that the map should probviously cycle back to 1. Nevertheless, in a postscript, Conway wrote...2023, Peter Lynch, “Amusical Permutations and Unsettleable Problems”, in ThatsMaths
Origin of probvious
Blend of probabilistically + obvious. Coined by American mathematician John Horton Conway in 2013.
Questions about probvious
- What does probvious mean?
- Probvious means able to be shown to hold with very high confidence via heuristic arguments, but not formally provable.
- What part of speech is probvious?
- Probvious is an adjective.
Words near probvious in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: probvious (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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