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"Proof assistants can’t read a maths textbook, they need continuous input from humans, and they can’t decide whether a mathematical statement is interesting or profound — only whether it is correct, Buzzard says. Still, computers might soon be able to point out consequences of the known facts that mathematicians had failed to notice, he adds." we're closer to this than people realize
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Why do you say this?
I'm not quite sure what you're asking about. I'm saying that we can't yet take the Wiles and Taylor-Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, feed it into a machine, and get a Lean proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
See other comment. It's sound but not decidable.
Basically it turned out that theoretical undecidability did not matter in practice, because Scholze mathematics relies so little on definitional equality. We prove theorems with `simp` not `refl`. Pierre-Marie Pédrot is quoted above as saying that various design decisions are "breaking everything around", but we don't care that our `refl` is slightly broken because it is regarded as quite a low-level tool for the tas…
Does anyone know how condensed mathematics would fit into the modern theory of PDEs (which is heavily based on functional analysis)? Perhaps it's a relic of the sort of math Scholze works on, but it looks far too abstract to provide an impetus for people in those fields to embrace it. Topology, on the other hand, is relatively easy to define and work with (though there are some quirks with dual spaces of continuous l…
I think that right now it is not clear why condensed/liquid mathematics would be useful for PDEs. On the other hand, your question > Or does it "contain" topology in some sense, allowing people to continue working with notions of convergence obtained from norms? has a positive answer. You can, if you want, swap out topological spaces, and use condensed sets instead, and just continue with life as usual. At the same t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that right now it is not clear why condensed/liquid mathematics would be useful for PDEs. On the other hand, your question > Or does it "contain" topology in some sense, allowing people to continue working with notions of convergence obtained from norms? has a positive answer. You can, if you want, swap out topological spaces, and use condensed sets instead, and just continue with life as usual. At the same t…
Thanks for sharing your expertise. Would you be open to sharing your background? Obviously it's not required, but it would help contextualize what you're saying for the interested non-mathematician; otherwise we're kinda stuck with 'some guy on the Internet said ...' syndrome. :)
I'm Johan Commelin, https://math.commelin.net/
This is going to be an exciting area. I spent some time previously playing with Coq. It's very powerful, but even proving the simplest undergraduate maths statements (say, about group theory) can prove very challenging. I believe that part of this is that Coq uses different mathematical foundations than traditional mathematics, which mostly uses set theory (ZFC, although most people don't care about the specifics). S…
"Proof assistants can’t read a maths textbook, they need continuous input from humans, and they can’t decide whether a mathematical statement is interesting or profound — only whether it is correct, Buzzard says. Still, computers might soon be able to point out consequences of the known facts that mathematicians had failed to notice, he adds." we're closer to this than people realize
I agree, but I think my statement is accurate today in 2021. I would love to see funds directed towards this sort of question. The big problem is that at high level so so much is skipped over, and you still sometimes have to struggle to put undergraduate-level mathematics into Lean -- this is why UG maths is such a good test case.
This is an issue, but there's an established practice of writing formal sketches where the gaps in the proof are explicitly marked, and future tooling might bring ways to address these gaps once a full formal context is provided.
One issue is that Lean has little or no support for declarative proof, which is by far the most natural setting for these "proof sketches", and also brings other advantages wrt. complex proofs. (Coq has the same issue; some code was written to support declarative proofs, but it was too buggy and bitrotted, so it got removed.)
The abiltiy to automate proofs creates some interesting questions about the nature of mathematics. The article remined me of Erdos saying that you "don't need to believe in God, but you do need to believe in the book", 'the book' here being an imagined collection of mathematical proofs that are so simple, clear and beautiful that they immedieately stand out to any mathematician. I don't mind proof assistants as a way…
This is going to be an exciting area. I spent some time previously playing with Coq. It's very powerful, but even proving the simplest undergraduate maths statements (say, about group theory) can prove very challenging. I believe that part of this is that Coq uses different mathematical foundations than traditional mathematics, which mostly uses set theory (ZFC, although most people don't care about the specifics). S…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically it turned out that theoretical undecidability did not matter in practice, because Scholze mathematics relies so little on definitional equality. We prove theorems with `simp` not `refl`. Pierre-Marie Pédrot is quoted above as saying that various design decisions are "breaking everything around", but we don't care that our `refl` is slightly broken because it is regarded as quite a low-level tool for the tas…
Can you explain to a non-mathematician how you can prove anything without refl (which I assume is the statement “x=x is true”) ?