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Re:Titans of Mathematics Clash Over Epic Proof of ABC Conjec... by roenxi on Friday September 21, 2018 @04:13AM (#18038024)
scratches head I'm pretty sure I can come up with a codified language proof that you will accept, then define a mapping between the language and transformations of a diagram. And while not an expert on isomorphism, but I'm pretty sure that makes the visual proof isomorphic with the codified language and hence valid (and, indeed, computable).

Basically, although code and proofs are in a sense isomorphic, I think everything and proofs are isomorpic in the same sense. So claiming that proofs should be structured to the same standards as code because code is isomorphic to proof is a bit of a non-sequitur. Why not show the layout of my rock garden is isomorphic to code and hence proving something (my rock garden can be Turing complete) and then claim my rock garden should be structured like a program?

Basically, the idea that the structure mathematicians favour for proofs have fallen behind programmers laying out of code is not well substantiated and the idea that 'proofs are isomorphic to code' is not useful because it is far too broad.

Re:Titans of Mathematics Clash Over Epic Proof of ABC Conjec... by chriswarbo on Saturday September 22, 2018 @12:31AM (#18044453)
It's not so much that programs are isomorphic to proofs; it's that mathematics and programming are the same activity. It's essentially a historical accident that the people who practice this activity have ended up in different groups, and that those groups use different terminology for the same things ("program" vs "proof", "type" vs "proposition", "execute" vs "simplify", "tuple" vs "conjunction", "union" vs "disjunction", "function" vs "implication", "dependent function" vs "universal quantification", "interface" vs "existential", "programming language" vs "logical system", etc.).

All of the relationships between these are the same too (e.g. a program `p` has type `T`, iff the proof `p` proves the proposition `T`; the proof `w` proves that the existence of `x` implies the proposition `y AND z` iff the program `w` is a function which generates a tuple of `(y, z)` when given an argument implementing the interface `x`; and so on).

Mathematicians and programmers do care about different things. Mathematicians are more concerned with informally proving previously unknown results; which corresponds to something like learning that a type has a value by sketching some pseudocode. Programmers care deeply about how many steps their proofs (programs) take to simplify; how easy it is to modify a proof to prove a slightly different proposition, etc. Yet there are so many good ideas on each side that are immediately applicable (e.g. dependently typed languages take rigorous logical systems and view them as programming languages; proof engineering takes software engineering ideas and applies them to building and maintaining proofs).

I'm struggling to think of an activity involving rock gardens that corresponds precisely to, say, universal quantification.