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Large-Scale Formal Proof for the Working Mathematician—Lessons Learnt from the ALEXANDRIA Project

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Intelligent Computer Mathematics (CICM 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14101))

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Abstract

ALEXANDRIA is an ERC-funded project that started in 2017, with the aim of bringing formal verification to mathematics. The past six years have seen great strides in the formalisation of mathematics and also in some relevant technologies, above all machine learning. Six years of intensive formalisation activity seem to show that even the most advanced results, drawing on multiple fields of mathematics, can be formalised using the tools available today.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.newton.ac.uk/event/bpr/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.ma.imperial.ac.uk/~buzzard/xena/.

  3. 3.

    An email from Angeliki proposing to prove Szemerédi’s regularity lemma is dated 8 July 2021. The formalisation was done by 5 November; Roth, 28 December.

  4. 4.

    https://www.isa-afp.org.

  5. 5.

    https://behemoth.cl.cam.ac.uk/search/.

  6. 6.

    https://behemoth.cl.cam.ac.uk/ipc/.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the ERC Advanced Grant ALEXANDRIA (Project GA 742178). Chelsea Edmonds, Angeliki Koutsoukou-Argyraki and Wenda Li provided numerous helpful comments and suggestions.

For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.

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  1. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Lawrence C. Paulson

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  1. Lawrence C. Paulson
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Correspondence to Lawrence C. Paulson .

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  1. ENSIIE, Evry, France

    Catherine Dubois

  2. University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

    Manfred Kerber

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Paulson, L.C. (2023). Large-Scale Formal Proof for the Working Mathematician—Lessons Learnt from the ALEXANDRIA Project. In: Dubois, C., Kerber, M. (eds) Intelligent Computer Mathematics. CICM 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14101. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42753-4_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42753-4_1

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