This special issue of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science is devoted to the theme of ‘Interactive theorem proving and the formalisation of mathematics’.

The formalisation of mathematics started at the turn of the 20th century when mathematical logic emerged from the work of Frege and his contemporaries with the invention of the formal notation for mathematical statements called predicate calculus. This notation allowed the formulation of abstract general statements over possibly infinite domains in a uniform way, and thus went well beyond propositional calculus, which goes back to Aristotle and only allowed tautologies over unquantified statements.

N. G. de Bruijn, now professor emeritus of the Eindhoven University of Technology, was a pioneer in the field of interactive theorem proving. From 1967 to the end of the 1970's, his work on the Automath system introduced the architecture that is common to most of today's proof assistants, and much of the basic technology. But de Bruijn was a mathematician first and foremost, as evidenced by the many mathematical notions and results that bear his name, among them de Bruijn sequences, de Bruijn graphs, the de Bruijn–Newman constant, and the de Bruijn–Erdös theorem. The quotation above is thus interesting not because it is a reflection on his expertise in formal verification, but, rather, of his convictions as a working mathematician.

We discuss a formal development for the certification of Newton's method. We address several issues encountered in the formal study of numerical algorithms: developing the necessary libraries for our proofs, adapting paper proofs to suit the features of a proof assistant and designing new proofs based on the existing ones to deal with optimisations of the method. We start from Kantorovitch's Theorem, which gives the convergence of Newton's method in the case of a system of equations. To formalise this proof inside the proof assistant Coq, we first need to code the necessary concepts from multivariate analysis. We also prove that rounding at each step in Newton's method still yields a convergent process with an accurate correlation between the precision of the input and that of the result. This proof is based on Kantorovitch's Theorem, but is an original result. An algorithm including rounding is a more accurate model for computations with Newton's method in practice.

Pick's Theorem relates the area of a simple polygon with vertices at integer lattice points to the number of lattice points in its inside and boundary. We describe a formal proof of this theorem using the HOL Light theorem prover. As sometimes happens for highly geometrical proofs, the formalisation turned out to be more work than initially expected. The difficulties arose mostly from formalising the triangulation process for an arbitrary polygon.

Bernstein coefficients provide a discrete approximation of the behaviour of a polynomial inside an interval. This can be used, for example, to isolate the real roots of polynomials. We prove formally a criterion for the existence of a single root in an interval and the correctness of the de Casteljau algorithm for computing Bernstein coefficients efficiently.

We describe some formal topological results, formalised in Matita 1/2, presented in predicative intuitionistic logic and in terms of Overlap Algebras.

Overlap Algebras are new algebraic structures designed to ease reasoning about subsets in an algebraic way within intuitionistic logic. We find that they also ease the formalisation of formal topological results in an interactive theorem prover.

Our main result is the existence of a functor between two categories of ‘generalised topological spaces’, one with points (Basic Pairs) and the other point-free (Basic Topologies). This formalisation is part of a wider scientific collaboration with the inventor of the theory, Giovanni Sambin. His goal is to verify in what sense his theory is ‘implementable’, and to discover what problems may arise in the process. We check that all intermediate constructions respect the stringent size requirements imposed by predicative logic. The formalisation is quite unusual, since it has to make explicit size information that is often hidden.

We found that the version of Matita used for the formalisation was largely inappropriate. The formalisation drove several major improvements of Matita that will be integrated in the next major release (Matita 1.0). We show some motivating examples, taken directly from the formalisation, for these improvements. We also describe a possibly sub-optimal solution in Matita 1/2, which is exploitable in other similar systems. We briefly discuss a better solution available in Matita 1.0.

The introduction of first-class type classes in the Coq system calls for a re-examination of the basic interfaces used for mathematical formalisation in type theory. We present a new set of type classes for mathematics and take full advantage of their unique features to make practical a particularly flexible approach that was formerly thought to be unfeasible. Thus, we address traditional proof engineering challenges as well as new ones resulting from our ambition to build upon this development a library of constructive analysis in which any abstraction penalties inhibiting efficient computation are reduced to a minimum.

The basis of our development consists of type classes representing a standard algebraic hierarchy, as well as portions of category theory and universal algebra. On this foundation, we build a set of mathematically sound abstract interfaces for different kinds of numbers, succinctly expressed using categorical language and universal algebra constructions. Strategic use of type classes lets us support these high-level theory-friendly definitions, while still enabling efficient implementations unhindered by gratuitous indirection, conversion or projection.

Algebra thrives on the interplay between syntax and semantics. The Prolog-like abilities of type class instance resolution allow us to conveniently define a quote function, thus facilitating the use of reflective techniques.

Termination is an important property of programs, and is notably required for programs formulated in proof assistants. It is a very active subject of research in the Turing-complete formalism of term rewriting. Over the years, many methods and tools have been developed to address the problem of deciding termination for specific problems (since it is undecidable in general). Ensuring the reliability of those tools is therefore an important issue.

In this paper we present a library formalising important results of the theory of well-founded (rewrite) relations in the proof assistant Coq. We also present its application to the automated verification of termination certificates, as produced by termination tools.

The sources are freely available at http://color.inria.fr/.

Interactive theorem provers based on dependent type theory have the flexibility to support both constructive and classical reasoning. Constructive reasoning is supported natively by dependent type theory, and classical reasoning is typically supported by adding additional non-constructive axioms. However, there is another perspective that views constructive logic as an extension of classical logic. This paper will illustrate how classical reasoning can be supported in a practical manner inside dependent type theory without additional axioms. We will show several examples of how classical results can be applied to constructive mathematics. Finally, we will show how to extend this perspective from logic to mathematics by representing classical function spaces using a weak value monad.

Over recent decades there has been a trend towards formalised mathematics, and a number of sophisticated systems have been developed both to support the formalisation process and to verify the results mechanically. However, each tool is based on a specific foundation of mathematics, and formalisations in different systems are not necessarily compatible. Therefore, the integration of these foundations has received growing interest. We contribute to this goal by using LF as a foundational framework in which the mathematical foundations themselves can be formalised and therefore also the relations between them. We represent three of the most important foundations – Isabelle/HOL, Mizar and ZFC set theory – as well as relations between them. The relations are formalised in such a way that the framework permits the extraction of translation functions, which are guaranteed to be well defined and sound. Our work provides the starting point for a systematic study of formalised foundations in order to compare, relate and integrate them.

We present a programme of research for pluralist formalisations, that is, formalisations that involve proving results in more than one foundation.

A foundation consists of two parts: a logical part, which provides a notion of inference, and a non-logical part, which provides the entities to be reasoned about. An LTT is a formal system composed of two such separate parts. We show how LTTs may be used as the basis for a pluralist formalisation.

We show how different foundations may be formalised as LTTs, and also describe a new method for proof reuse. If we know that a translation Φ exists between two logic-enriched type theories (LTTs) S and T, and we have formalised a proof of a theorem α in S, we may wish to make use of the fact that Φ(α) is a theorem of T. We show how this is sometimes possible by writing a proof script MΦ. For any proof script Mα that proves a theorem α in S, if we change Mα so it first imports MΦ, the resulting proof script will still parse, and will be a proof of Φ(α) in T.

In this paper, we focus on the logical part of an LTT-framework and show how the above method of proof reuse is done for four cases of Φ: inclusion, the double negation translation, the A-translation and the Russell–Prawitz modality. This work has been carried out using the proof assistant Plastic.