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A mathematical formalisation challenge by Peter Scholze

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Re: A mathematical formalisation challenge by Peter Scholze

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you get to the symbols, all becomes symbol manipulation, so why would computer proof verification systems not be up to the task?

Well, climbing Mt. Everest is also "just moving your arms and legs". But I'm not up to that task! It's certainly possible in principle, but whether it's possible in practice is part of the challenge. You need enough people that understand the details of the proof, and know how to turn that into a formally verified proof. Such proofs can also become slow, so to keep things practical, you also need to take speed into a…

"Quantity has a quality all its own"

Also, and perhaps easier to wrap one's head around, is issues of tooling. Already, there is a very heavy use of "tactics" (metaprograms, and ones with decent computational complexity (think "search" not just "expansion")). Mathematicians write lemmas so we can try to run the tactics on "mini problems" that do not grow even as the total body of work grows, but there's always a risk the that there's some sticking point one cannot break down enough.

Re: A mathematical formalisation challenge by Peter Scholze

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Hilbert’s Program wasn't actually set back by the incompleteness theorems in the first place, it was all FUD.

Not sure what you mean by that: after Gödel, Hilbert essentially became hopeless.

Hilbert misunderstood his own program :D

Re: A mathematical formalisation challenge by Peter Scholze

#23

What are good beginner resources to learn Lean?

An addictive personality :).

Theorem proving can be a fun open-world videogame, and I do hope these aspects can be refined overtime to make real mathematics a lot more accessible.

Re: A mathematical formalisation challenge by Peter Scholze

#25
post #6

This paragraph is paramount, coming from one of the youngest Fields Medalists and a truly trusted source. Truly honest and inspiring. “ I have occasionally been able to be very persuasive even with wrong arguments. (Fun fact: In the selection exams for the international math olympiad, twice I got full points for a wrong solution. Later, I once had a full proof of the weight-monodromy conjecture that passed the judgme…

To add another data point: I submitted a paper to a major mathematics journal which had a mistake in a proof. One of the referees flagged that I was making a claim without proving it, and asked for me to revise it. I submitted a revised version which still had a mistake in the same step and it was accepted.

(Three years later, my doctoral supervisor pointed out the mistake to me, and we published another paper -- in the same journal -- filling the gap.)

Re: A mathematical formalisation challenge by Peter Scholze

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember Pentium’s division bug (on mobile so cannot cooy-paste). We need some king of certificate of proof, not just some black-box which answers “OK”, “NOT-OK”.

The theorem proves that are discussed here already do that.

blah blah blah type checkers blah blah blah can be run on different chipsets / OS's blah blah blah computers are several orders of magnitude more accurate blah blah blah not really the issue.
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