logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premise ...

, especially as applied in mathematics, concept is a special case or

specialization Specialization or Specialized may refer to: Academia * Academic specialization, may be a course of study or major at an academic institution or may refer to the field in which a specialist practices * Specialty (medicine), a branch of medical ...

of concept precisely if every instance of is also an instance of but not vice versa, or equivalently, if is a

generalization A generalization is a form of abstraction whereby common properties of specific instances are formulated as general concepts or claims. Generalizations posit the existence of a domain or set of elements, as well as one or more common characte ...

of . A limiting case is a type of special case which is arrived at by taking some aspect of the concept to the extreme of what is permitted in the general case. A degenerate case is a special case which is in some way qualitatively different from almost all of the cases allowed. Special case examples include the following: * All squares are rectangles (but not all rectangles are squares); therefore the square is a special case of the rectangle. *

Fermat's Last Theorem In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem (sometimes called Fermat's conjecture, especially in older texts) states that no three positive integers , , and satisfy the equation for any integer value of greater than 2. The cases and have been ...

, that has no solutions in positive integers with , is a special case of Beal's conjecture, that has no primitive solutions in positive integers with , , and all greater than 2, specifically, the case of {{mvar, x {{= y {{= z.

See also