16 comments

  • Davidzheng1 hour ago
    Makes me sad that the homotopical foundation people never got their shit together and now formalization is so mature but it's still done in set theoretic foundations.
    • m_j_g1 hour ago
      we are moving forward steadily :) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marcinjangrzybowski&#x2F;cubical-bis&#x2F;blob&#x2F;integrate-lorenzo-premetric-fast-rationals&#x2F;Cubical&#x2F;AnalysisC&#x2F;SCOPE_ROADMAP.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marcinjangrzybowski&#x2F;cubical-bis&#x2F;blob&#x2F;inte...</a> (see table in the middle of doc) mind, that it is fully constructive implementation, you can get arbitrary precision aproximation to every real expression. for now WIP, but soon will be aviable in cubical-library :) also our related TYPES2026 presentation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;types2026.cse.chalmers.se&#x2F;slides&#x2F;51.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;types2026.cse.chalmers.se&#x2F;slides&#x2F;51.pdf</a>
    • HappyPanacea30 minutes ago
      The stronger AI become the easier it should be to develop and move to alternative foundations.
  • mlmonkey7 hours ago
    Out of curiosity: is it possible to take a frontier model and just let it loose on all math textbooks out there, converting each and every proof&#x2F;theorem&#x2F;lemma&#x2F;etc. into Lean? A frontier model should be able to do that, right? And it&#x27;s a one-time task: do it once and it&#x27;s there for eternity, available as a library to be used in other proofs.<p>Maybe my understanding of Lean is wrong; I&#x27;m thinking of it as a programming language but for Math.
    • jonath_laurent7 hours ago
      Axiom MTS here. What you describe is pretty close to how we formalised this proof, which is scattered across more than 500 articles and books: a swarm of agents was tasked with going through all these sources.<p>One challenge is assembling everything into a coherent whole, since the same informal concept can be formalised in slightly different but incompatible ways.
      • p11p3 hours ago
        [flagged]
        • penteract2 hours ago
          Producing a formalized proof from a non-formalized proof in a paper or book should not be considered a violation of copyright.
          • pfdietz2 hours ago
            Indeed; one cannot copyright mathematical ideas, only their specific expressions. And the formalization is a different expression.
    • bananaflag7 hours ago
      Yes, but thing is, for a lot of basic stuff there are myriad ways in which it is formulated, so humans have to decide which of them goes in the library. Of course you can include two or five or ten equivalent formulations (like textbooks sometimes do) but still, not everything under the sun.<p>Probably this will be done in some form in the coming months.
      • thaumasiotes5 hours ago
        &gt; Of course you can include two or five or ten equivalent formulations (like textbooks sometimes do) but still, not everything under the sun.<p>Note that mathlib currently includes duplicates of many theorems; I believe deduplication is an active goal (if not one seeing much labor right now).
    • aureianimus6 hours ago
      Yes and no. With enough compute, probably, but doing this does not necessarily yield a reusable library. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenaproject.wordpress.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;how-to-formalize-all-of-mathematics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xenaproject.wordpress.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;how-to-formaliz...</a>
    • Someone3 hours ago
      _If_ you have formalized a provable theorem in Lean, a simple bread-first search can prove it. It will take lots (and lots, and lots, and lots…) of time, though (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;General_Problem_Solver" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;General_Problem_Solver</a>).<p>LLMs can do smarter searches, and will likely find proofs for most of them, but are not guaranteed to find a proof.
    • tyromaniac7 hours ago
      Write a few proofs with it and then come back to this
    • QuesnayJr7 hours ago
      I think people assume that it would end up not being usable by humans without a lot of hand-holding. Though maybe that&#x27;s wrong, and somebody should try it.
  • sebzim45008 hours ago
    This seems like a very good use of auto-formalization, because in the past mathematicians have incorrectly believed that they were finished with the classification only discover a missing class&#x2F;sporadic group.<p>The original proof was a collaboration of ~100 mathematicians, if Tao is correct then we should expect to see more such collaborations in the future like we do in e.g. physics.
    • QuesnayJr7 hours ago
      They didn&#x27;t discover a missing sporadic group. The big gap in the proof (the quasithin case) happened because it was covered in a 600-page unpublished manuscript that under further investigation turned out to be incomplete.
  • compacct273 hours ago
    Groups were my gateway drug into abstract algebra. A friend clued me into symmetry being everywhere and Groups are how symmetry is formalized, and it’s been a crazy journey understanding all that. The frontier models can tie those abstract concepts to plain English examples and answer questions decently well, it’s never been a better time to pick up the field solo and see what it has to offer us
  • vessenes1 hour ago
    Note they found one gap (and filled it) in the previously accepted 1,000+ page proof. So that&#x27;s pretty cool.
  • sleepyams2 hours ago
    Somehow the classification of finite simple groups makes me feel uneasy as a mathematician, but I suppose this helps quell that feeling.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monster_group" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monster_group</a>
    • jbaber1 hour ago
      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monstrous_moonshine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monstrous_moonshine</a>
  • pfdietz8 hours ago
    The formalization is 43.1M lines of Lean.
    • bwestergard7 hours ago
      Is that going to be mathematically useful?
      • sebzim45007 hours ago
        It&#x27;s nice to know that they didn&#x27;t miss anything. The natural language proof is 10,000 pages and they have missed groups in the past.
        • cvoss2 hours ago
          Indeed, this formalization effort spotted a flawed argument in one of the original publications and worked around it to repair the result.
        • Panoramix5 hours ago
          How do we know the formalization itself doesn&#x27;t have any errors? AFAIK it&#x27;s very far from trivial to formalize something.
          • kenferry2 hours ago
            Well, the point of the _computer_ formalization is that it&#x27;s checkable.<p>An error in the formalization would be a bug in lean. Which, as we know, certainly seems plausible (I&#x27;ve mused on if these giant proofs are incentivizing LLMs to find lean bugs to exploit), but at least it&#x27;s a smaller surface area.
          • sebzim45005 hours ago
            In general checking that the definitions are correct isn&#x27;t that hard and assuming at least one of the lean kernels you verify with is correct (which tbf is an assumption, the implementations are based on each other so could have a common bug) that&#x27;s all you need to verify.<p>In this case the statement is unusually complicated but still much much easier to verify than the proof itself.
      • pfdietz6 hours ago
        The proof was of such complexity and length there were lingering doubts. This dispels them.
      • curt157 hours ago
        More so if Lean uncovers logical errors. Note also there is already an ongoing 2nd generation proof.
    • cubefox5 hours ago
      I suppose this is the longest Lean proof by a wide margin.
      • pfdietz3 hours ago
        It&#x27;s possibly the longest open source project of any kind (depending on whether you count comments and white space in Linux).
        • cubefox3 hours ago
          I wonder whether humans could have realistically finished it without AI by 2100.
          • cvoss2 hours ago
            I would bet no. Because the original proof is so distributed, with parts of it being very old, and with parts of it being, as a first attempt, not the most concise or lucid route to the result, we were rapidly approaching a world where the empirical knowledge of how&#x2F;why the result holds was literally dying.<p>The article refers to its use of the &quot;first-generation proof&quot;. It would seem this proof is too large to be truly known by one person, and the group of people who &quot;collectively knew&quot; it grew old and started to die. Since its original formulation, mathematicians began to compile, consolidate, and revise the proof into a 2nd generation digested form (estimated to be 5000 pages instead of tens of thousands). But that effort was still so monumental in its own right that a 3rd gen proof project began to digest the 2nd gen proof before the 2nd gen proof was even finished. I believe both the 2nd and 3rd gen projects are still ongoing.<p>It will be interesting to see how small the proof gets once we finish learning how to obtain these results &quot;efficiently&quot; with the benefit of hindsight.
          • sebzim45001 hour ago
            Depends if you include a few decades of improvements in lean itself. Non-AI proof automation is much better than it was even a year ago and so some fiddly results can now be done with `by grind`.<p>Also don&#x27;t discount the fact that people would learn how to do this kind of project, currently no one really knows how to decide what definitions work best, what should be reducible, what should be part of a public api and what should be local to a module, etc.
    • gggg_g_g__g2 hours ago
      Holy shit.
    • claudismusa1 hour ago
      [dead]
  • senderista4 hours ago
    Filling in well-known gaps like this is the kind of thing the AI companies should be doing, not trying to scoop research in progress.
  • vatsachak7 hours ago
    LLM formalization is not as useful as human formalization, but nice to know that the Classification is correct
  • pixl977 hours ago
    Page has some kind of redirect bug that steals the back button, may want to open it in a new tab to avoid that.
  • QuesnayJr7 hours ago
    I&#x27;m surprised they only found one gap. I would have expected multiple (fixable) gaps would have been uncovered, especially since the result was spread over many papers by many different people.
    • bamb0086 hours ago
      In [1] they claim:<p>&gt;However, there were 34 noteworthy deviations from the published record that needed to be resolved, the most substantial of which related to the Unbalanced Group Theorem.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;axiommath.ai&#x2F;research&#x2F;the-enormous-theorem-formalized&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;axiommath.ai&#x2F;research&#x2F;the-enormous-theorem-formalize...</a>
    • contubernio6 hours ago
      Many many gaps had been found and patched (by humans) already over the last forty years.
  • esafak4 hours ago
    Looking at the visualizations made me wonder if the embeddings themselves can be used to suggest, if not derive, mathematical results. I realize it depends on the quality of the embeddings.
  • Salparvezml7 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • v3ai7 hours ago
    based if true