# Negation and De Morgan's Law

Safely simplify complicated negation logic

Undoubtedly, your grade school grammar teacher has scolded you at one point or another for your inadvertent use of a double negative. Statements such as “I don’t know nothing about physics”, while grammatically incorrect, are often semantically inaccurate as well. While the previous statement would commonly be understood to mean the person possesses no knowledge of physics, the actual statement implies the opposite, that the preposition “I know nothing about physics” is incorrect. Certainly your teacher offered sound advice and one would be wise to heed such instruction.

Unfortunately, when programming such double negation is quite common and often leads to disastrous ends. For example, who would qualify for the below condition?

<?php
if( !($student->age != 18 && !$student->enrolled('Physics')) ) { ... }


We want someone who is not both not 18 and not enrolled in physics. Simple, right?

Granted, at the time this snippet was written, it might have been well understood by the author. But 6 months later when this line needs altered by a different developer, precious time is wasted deciphering this twisted logic.

This is where De Morgan’s Laws come in handy. From Wikipedia:

“The negation of a conjunction is the disjunction of the negations.”
“The negation of a disjunction is the conjunction of the negations.“

Great, so what does that mean? Basically, it means that if you have two conditions — p and q — and you apply the negation to the statement p and q, this is logically equivalent to !p or !q. Similarly, if we have the statement p or q to which we apply the negation operation, this is logically equivalent to !p and !q.

The easiest way to think about this mentally is that when we apply a negation across a statement, we prepend each preposition ( either p or q ) with the not operator, and every time we encounter the logical operators and or or, we toggle them

Thus, ! ( ( p or q ) and ( r or s ) ) implies ( (!p and !q) or (!r and !s)).

Using De Morgan’s law, let’s simplify the logic of our initial if condition.

Let us assume the preposition p represents the condition where the student’s age is 18 and q represents the condition where the student is enrolled in physics. Given this, our initial condition can be written in a more compact form as

if( !(!p && !q) ) {

After applying De Morgan’s Law, we have

if( !!p || !!q ) {

The negation of the negation of p is p, so the above reduces to

if( p || q ) {

Substituting p and q for the original conditions, we arrive at the greatly simplified

<?php
if ( $student->age == 18 ||$student->enrolled('Physics') ) {


which is much more readily understood.

In order to convince you that the two statements are logically equivalent, a truth table is provided below. Note that the second to last column contains the results of the original condition, and the last column is the reduced condition.

| p | q | !p | !q | !p && !q | !(!p ^ !q) | p v q |
|---+---+----+----+----------+------------+-------|
| 1 | 1 |  0 |  0 |        0 |          1 |     1 |
| 1 | 0 |  0 |  1 |        0 |          1 |     1 |
| 0 | 1 |  1 |  0 |        0 |          1 |     1 |
| 0 | 0 |  1 |  1 |        1 |          0 |     0 |

As you can see, De Morgan’s Law is a powerful tool for managing conditional complexity in code. I hope this hasn’t not helped.