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A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

blogs.scientificamerican.com

81–90 of 103 posts

Re: A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

#81
post #6

"I think most of us, including my math-phobic Facebook friends, would find the second version easier to follow and understand." I guess I'm in the minority. I preferred the words (though the translation was a bit ungainly).

I'd say the problem with math notation is that it simply has too many symbols. It has a different symbol for everything because it was designed as a handwritten system. For you mathematicians, think what you would do if you woke up tomorrow and all the math symbols had been replaced with emoji? I think most normal people would just learn the four operators and that's all... you know: megaphone, pizza slice, backpack,…

It’d be fine. Notation doesn’t replace prose.

The best feature of mathematical notation is its ambiguity. It needs to be parsed by a human, not a machine. Poetry is similar. There’s tradition, but few rules.

Re: A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

#82
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason for using different scripts (Greek etc.) is to sort symbols by broad categories. Done right, it actually makes things more readable (to the sophisticated reader, which is the mathematician's target audience anyway). It's almost like an implicit type system: (within a particular context) Greek letters mean ordinals, lowercase Roman letters mean predicate logic variables, uppercase German letters mean univer…

Yes that's the pre-computer I was talking about. Sophisticated mathematicians should be concerned about if it is machine readable or not. If it's machine readable then you can use whatever font, color, or any other style you want that helps you to read it. The viewer can abbreviate descriptive names to single glyphs if you want. Programming is much less fun, and harder to follow, without syntax highlighting. But it d…

Why? I write mathematics to share with mathematicians, not machines.

Would you ask a poet to make the same sacrifice for machine comprehension?

Re: A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

#83
I agree with the concerns on the false dichotomy between theoretical computer science and mathematics, but from the mathematician's perspective I think there's another issue not being discussed due to the typical CS obsession over automated proof systems.

Mathematics is a social subject, invented by humans largely for their own amusement. The goal of a mathematical proof is to communicate insight to other humans. Of course the point is also to be correct, but somehow communicating insight takes priority. Relying on large bodies of latent knowledge, and omitting details, is an effective way to do that. Allowing for occasional mistakes is okay, because mathematics as a whole is fault tolerant (or at least, history gives evidence to that claim).

Lamport's field is a bit different, because there they study distributed protocols with the intent of creating value in the real world. So when they prove a theorem, they're not just proving a theorem to gain understanding about something, they're proving a theorem so they can improve the security or fault-tolerance (or whatever else) of some real system. Writing down a 200+ page TLA proof is measurably worth the investment because the users of their work (applied computer scientists and engineers) want error-free theorems and a clean CS literature much more than they want insight.

For mathematicians communicating to other mathematicians, a two-paragraph argument that is convincing and omits the details (that one can verify on their own) is much more valuable. I'm not trying to make a value judgement either way, just trying to explain the culture of math proofs and why I think something like TLA+ will never catch on among mainstream mathematicians. You might say it's mathematicians defending their job security, but it's also simply that mathematicians like exploring and inventing and hearing creative proofs and perspectives. Deferring things to computers removes the a-ha moment.

[Edit] And the idea that somehow high school students and undergraduates will magically start reading and understanding proofs because we write them using TLA+ is a joke.

Re: A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

#84
post #40
post #36

To be fair, Leslie Lamport is also a Mathematician (his PhD was in Math).

And "computer science is one of the hardest branches of applied mathematics" (who's the author? Did Dijkstra said something like that?), so Lamport is in his own field.

I think it's about time theoretical computer science was considered a branch of pure mathematics. All we do in this field is prove theorems.

Re: A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

#85
post #4

Basically, do it the way Spivak does. Funny thing is in freshman year we were taught to do just that, but then abandoned the formality pretty much immediately after.

Hear, hear. Spivak motivated me to emphasize the humanistic features of mathematics.

Thankfully, his view underpins elite mathematics programs, e.g.

http://www.hcssim.org

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_55

Re: A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

#86
post #14

The problem isn't notation in itself; it's rarely used and non-self-explanatory notation that's a problem. You can achieve the same with words by inventing your own words and demanding that everyone learn them to understand you.

And that isn’t a problem if you’re writing about something I care about …

Re: A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

#87
post #84
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And "computer science is one of the hardest branches of applied mathematics" (who's the author? Did Dijkstra said something like that?), so Lamport is in his own field.

I think it's about time theoretical computer science was considered a branch of pure mathematics. All we do in this field is prove theorems.

[deleted]

Re: A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

#88
post #14

The problem isn't notation in itself; it's rarely used and non-self-explanatory notation that's a problem. You can achieve the same with words by inventing your own words and demanding that everyone learn them to understand you.

How else can you describe something which does not exist except by making up a new word (or repurposing an old one)? Mathematicians do this every day.

Re: A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

#89
post #7
post #4

Basically, do it the way Spivak does. Funny thing is in freshman year we were taught to do just that, but then abandoned the formality pretty much immediately after.

My understanding from the linked paper in another thread, is not to do it the way Spivak does. That is, the article says Lamport "walked us through a proof of a corollary to the mean value theorem from that textbook, pointing out statements that he felt were not precise or rigorous enough and rewriting the proof using his technique." My reading of that is that Lamport found faults in Spivak's approach. Did I missread…

I also read through Lamport's critique and I'm not convinced by it. The 'errors' he points out are trivial, and the cultural assumption is that an active reader will fill in the omitted details.

Re: A Computer Scientist Tells Mathematicians How to Write Proofs

#90
post #3

This could have been more precise. The example at the start was great, but there's no example of the lecturer's technique outside of the link to the actual lecture

There's a link to his paper: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

After reading that, I think structured proofs should be written with an outliner [0] interface, where you can actually expand and collapse the hierarchy. Lamport also knows this. He repeatedly mentions it as "hypertext". However, he seems to be locked into LaTeX [1] and pdf generation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner

[1] Not really surprising. Lamport invented LaTeX.

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