We give an overview of the main ideas involved in the development of homotopy type theory and the univalent foundations of Mathematics programme. This serves as a background for the research papers published in the special issue.

We develop category theory within Univalent Foundations, which is a foundational system for mathematics based on a homotopical interpretation of dependent type theory. In this system, we propose a definition of ‘category’ for which equality and equivalence of categories agree. Such categories satisfy a version of the univalence axiom, saying that the type of isomorphisms between any two objects is equivalent to the identity type between these objects; we call them ‘saturated’ or ‘univalent’ categories. Moreover, we show that any category is weakly equivalent to a univalent one in a universal way. In homotopical and higher-categorical semantics, this construction corresponds to a truncated version of the Rezk completion for Segal spaces, and also to the stack completion of a prestack.

Working in homotopy type theory, we provide a systematic study of homotopy limits of diagrams over graphs, formalized in the Coq proof assistant. We discuss some of the challenges posed by this approach to the formalizing homotopy-theoretic material. We also compare our constructions with the more classical approach to homotopy limits via fibration categories.

We present an interpretation of a version of dependent type theory where a type is interpreted by a Kan semisimplicial set. This interprets only a weak notion of conversion similar to the one used in the first published version of Martin-Löf type theory. Each truncated version of this model can be carried out internally in dependent type theory, and we have formalized the first truncated level, which is enough to represent isomorphisms of algebraic structure as equality.

We will give a detailed account of why the simplicial sets model of the univalence axiom due to Voevodsky also models W-types. In addition, we will discuss W-types in categories of simplicial presheaves and an application to models of set theory.

This paper presents a dependently-typed construction of semi-simplicial sets in a type theory where sets are taken to be types. This addresses an open question raised on the wiki of the special year on Univalent Foundations at the Institute of Advanced Study (2012–2013).

We define a notion of homotopy in the effective topos.

The goal of this paper is to report on a formalization of the p-adic numbers in the setting of the second author's univalent foundations program. This formalization, which has been verified in the Coq proof assistant, provides an approach to the p-adic numbers in constructive algebra and analysis.

Homotopy type theory may be seen as an internal language for the ∞-category of weak ∞-groupoids. Moreover, weak ∞-groupoids model the univalence axiom. Voevodsky proposes this (language for) weak ∞-groupoids as a new foundation for Mathematics called the univalent foundations. It includes the sets as weak ∞-groupoids with contractible connected components, and thereby it includes (much of) the traditional set theoretical foundations as a special case. We thus wonder whether those ‘discrete’ groupoids do in fact form a (predicative) topos. More generally, homotopy type theory is conjectured to be the internal language of ‘elementary’ of ∞-toposes. We prove that sets in homotopy type theory form a ΠW-pretopos. This is similar to the fact that the 0-truncation of an ∞-topos is a topos. We show that both a subobject classifier and a 0-object classifier are available for the type theoretical universe of sets. However, both of these are large and moreover the 0-object classifier for sets is a function between 1-types (i.e. groupoids) rather than between sets. Assuming an impredicative propositional resizing rule we may render the subobject classifier small and then we actually obtain a topos of sets.

We describe a homotopical version of the relational and gluing models of type theory, and generalize it to inverse diagrams and oplax limits. Our method uses the Reedy homotopy theory on inverse diagrams, and relies on the fact that Reedy fibrant diagrams correspond to contexts of a certain shape in type theory. This has two main applications. First, by considering inverse diagrams in Voevodsky's univalent model in simplicial sets, we obtain new models of univalence in a number of (∞, 1)-toposes; this answers a question raised at the Oberwolfach workshop on homotopical type theory. Second, by gluing the syntactic category of univalent type theory along its global sections functor to groupoids, we obtain a partial answer to Voevodsky's homotopy-canonicity conjecture: in 1-truncated type theory with one univalent universe of sets, any closed term of natural number type is homotopic to a numeral.

This is a short overview of an experimental library of Mathematics formalized in the Coq proof assistant using the univalent interpretation of the underlying type theory of Coq. I started to work on this library in February 2010 in order to gain experience with formalization of Mathematics in a constructive type theory based on the intuition gained from the univalent models (see Kapulkin et al. 2012).