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Formal Proofs of Rounding Error Bounds

With Application to an Automatic Positive Definiteness Check

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Abstract

Floating-point arithmetic is a very efficient solution to perform computations in the real field. However, it induces rounding errors making results computed in floating-point differ from what would be computed with reals. Although numerical analysis gives tools to bound such differences, the proofs involved can be painful, hence error prone. We thus investigate the ability of a proof assistant like Coq to mechanically check such proofs. We demonstrate two different results involving matrices, which are pervasive among numerical algorithms, and show that a large part of the development effort can be shared between them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISAE, ONERA, Toulouse, France

    Pierre Roux

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  1. Pierre Roux
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Correspondence to Pierre Roux.

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This work was done while the author was a visiting researcher at LRI, Inria Saclay – Île-de-France.

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Roux, P. Formal Proofs of Rounding Error Bounds. J Autom Reasoning 57, 135–156 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10817-015-9339-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10817-015-9339-z

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