Symbolic Notation (continued)

As you can see, the conventions of the English language can make things confusing when it comes to conditional statements.  To alleviate this confusion, mathematicians use symbols to make things clearer.

You learned earlier that simple statements can be represented by letters.  We use the symbol "" to mean that one statement implies another.

Example:

We define
p: it is raining
q: I’ll take an umbrella

The conditional statement "If it is raining, then I’ll take an umbrella," would be written as "" in symbols and is read, "p implies q."