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deadbeef57

153 karma · joined June 17, 2021

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deadbeef57··on Mathematicians welcome computer-assisted proof in ‘grand unification’ theory
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 time, all of this is in fast paced development, so hopefully we will see some killer apps in the near future. But I expect them more in the direction of Hodge theory and complex analytic geometry.

deadbeef57··on Mathematicians welcome computer-assisted proof in ‘grand unification’ theory
See https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=10560, which links to a technical write-up by Scholze and Stix about what they think is the issue with Mochizuki's proof. Woit's blogpost also gives a bit more links, including a response by Mochizuki.
deadbeef57··on Mathematicians welcome computer-assisted proof in ‘grand unification’ theory
> Lean does not escape this limitation, as it defines the equality type inductively as in Coq. Rather, in a mastermind PR campaign, they successfully convinced non-experts of type theory that they could give them quotient types without breaking everything around.

This is not the first time that I hear someone from the Coq community talk about Lean and its "mastermind PR campaign". To me it comes across in a denigrating way, and frankly I'm a bit sick of it.

Working mathematicians are usually not experts of type theory. Yes. But they aren't stupid either. Why does the Lean community have such a large number of mathematician users? Why did it successfully formalize the main technical result of Peter Scholze's challenge in less than 6 months? Is this all because of a "mastermind PR campaign" selling mathematicians snake oil?

There has been some strong disagreements and even mud slinging between the Coq and Lean communities in the past. But I thought that axe was buried. I would like to move on.

I'm fine with people finding the foundations of Lean ugly, distasteful, improper, or whatever. But please stop the insults.

deadbeef57··on Mathematicians welcome computer-assisted proof in ‘grand unification’ theory
Yes and no. If you want to port large low-level proof objects in all their gory detail, then this has been done already. But if you want to port the more concise higher-level proof scripts you run in all the same issues as with regular transpilers.

Compare it to porting machine code for one instruction set to another instruction set. This is usually doable in a straightforward manner (maybe with a mild performance penalty). But transpiling idiomatic Java to idiomatic Haskell is nigh impossible.

Luckily, the differences between Lean 3 and Lean 4 are not as large as between Java and Haskell. But still, they have different idioms, different syntax, different features. And this has to be taken care of.

deadbeef57··on Mathematicians welcome computer-assisted proof in ‘grand unification’ theory
As explained in another comment, there is only very mild proof automation going on in this Lean project. Every non-trivial idea has to be supplied to the computer by a human being.

The whole circus around Mochizuki's proof of the abc conjecture was dealt with quite well by the social structure of the mathematical community. Many people looked at the proof. Many people got stuck. Several experts got stuck at exactly the same point. And Mochizuki refuses to acknowledge that there is a problem at that point of his "proof". But a consensus was reached in the mathematical community (maybe minus RIMS).

deadbeef57··on Mathematicians welcome computer-assisted proof in ‘grand unification’ theory
Ok, no worries. I understand that from a theoretical point it's not so nice that defeq is not decidable. But frankly I don't care. Because in practice, I don't know of any example where someone was bitten by this. It only shows up in contrived examples. And even if you have some practical example where lean gets stuck on A = B, it will probably be very easy to find a C so that lean gets unstuck on A = C = B.

[Edit, this comment only replies to the first paragraph of parent. I wrote it before parent was edited.]

deadbeef57··on Mathematicians welcome computer-assisted proof in ‘grand unification’ theory
See also [1] for a follow-up blogpost that is less technical.

[1]: https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2021/06/05/half-a-year-of-...

deadbeef57··on Mathematicians welcome computer-assisted proof in ‘grand unification’ theory
The claim that Lean's core is not completely sound is FUD. Completely bogus.

You might be confused by the fact that Lean's definitional equality is not decidable, but that doesn't mean it isn't sound. Nobody has ever found a proof of `false` so far in Lean 3.

The choice for Lean is actually quite natural: (i) it has a large and coherent library of mathematics to build such a project upon. And (ii), it has a substantial user base of mathematicians somewhat familiar with the subject at hand (i.e., condensed mathematics).

The initial challenge by Peter Scholze was directed at all theorem proving communities. As far as I know, only the Lean community took up the challenge.

(Concerning Lean 4: yes, mathlib will have to be ported. And yes, people are working hard on this. I think that none of the theorem provers so far are ready for wide-scale use in mathematics. And that's why it is important to iterate fast. The Lean community is not afraid of redesigns and large refactors when discovering better approaches.)

deadbeef57··on 1931: Kurt Gödel shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI
So you say that the computer verified proofs of the incompleteness theorem of verifying the wrong theorem? Because there can't be bugs in a computer verified proof.

(Of course there can theoretically be bugs in a computer verified proof. If there are bugs in the verifier. But if 4 independent proof assistants verify a proof of a theorem, this is extremely unlikely.)

deadbeef57··on 1931: Kurt Gödel shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI
I know of several computer verified proofs of the incompleteness theorem. See entry 6 of https://www.cs.ru.nl/~freek/100/ for a small catalogue. How does this relate to your objection? Are there bugs in the verifiers? Or did people verify the wrong theorem statement?
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