Communicating Formal Proofs: The Case of Flyspeck
Carst Tankink, Cezary Kaliszyk, Josef Urban, and Herman GeuversProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP 2013), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7998, pp. 451 – 456, 2013.
Abstract
We introduce a platform for presenting and cross-linking formal and informal proof developments together. The platform supports writing natural language ‘narratives’ that include islands of formal text. The formal text contains hyperlinks and gives on-demand state information at every proof step. We argue that such a system significantly lowers the threshold for understanding formal development and facilitates collaboration on informal and formal parts of large developments. As an example, we show the Flyspeck formal development (in HOL Light) and the Flyspeck informal mathematical text as a narrative linked to the formal development. To make this possible, we use the Agora system, a MathWiki platform developed at Nijmegen which has so far mainly been used with the Coq theorem prover: we show that the system itself is generic and easily adapted to the HOL Light case.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{CTCKJUHG-ITP13, author = "Carst Tankink and Cezary Kaliszyk and Josef Urban and Herman Geuvers", title = "Communicating Formal Proofs: The Case of {Flyspeck}", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving", editor = "Sandrine Blazy and Christine Paulin-Mohring and David Pichardie", series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science", volume = 7998, pages = "451--456", publisher = "Springer-Verlag", year = 2013, doi = "10.1007/978-3-642-39634-2_32" }