New math book rescues landmark topology proof

Re:New math book rescues landmark topology proof by 3PS on Thursday September 09, 2021 @11:52PM (#28477620)

It's not out of the question for research-level math to be formalized in proof assistants. Most notably, a landmark paper by Peter Scholze (a Fields medalist) was, at his request, formalized in Lean. Or at least, the important part was formalized in about 6 months. See [1] for the post where Scholze asks for help in formalizing the proof and explains why he thinks it's important - in this case it was a very gnarly proof of a theorem that could hopefully be used as a black box by other mathematicians. See [2] for Scholze's thoughts after the project succeeded, 6 months later.

[1] https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2020/12/05/liquid-tensor-e...

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

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Re:New math book rescues landmark topology proof by jacobolus on Friday September 10, 2021 @02:36PM (#28485472)

This is great work.

But to be clear: a community effort by 20+ people, after 6 months of work, managed to make progress toward proving a theorem, including proving some of the trickiest technical parts. As I said before, this is like 2 orders of magnitude more effort than the original plain-language (slightly sloppy/underspecified) proof.

Scholze:

> I cannot read the proofs at all — they are analogous to referring to theorems only via their LaTeX labels, together with a specification of the variables to which it gets applied; plus the names of some random proof finding routines.

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