Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact

• coq

  87 4,602 10.0 OCaml

  Coq is a formal proof management system. It provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs.

  

To be ruthlessly, uselessly pedantic - after all, we're mathematicians - there's reasonable definitions of "academic" where logical unsoundness is still academic if it never interfered with the reasoning behind any proofs of interest ;)

But: so long as we're accepting that unsoundness in your checker or its underlying theory are intrinsically deal breakers, there's definitely a long history of this, perhaps more somewhat more relevant than the HM example, since no proof checkers of note, AFAIK, have incorporated mutation into their type theory.

For one thing, the implementation can very easily have bugs. Coq itself certainly has had soundness bugs occasionally [0]. I'm sure Agda, Lean, Idris, etc. have too, but I've followed them less closely.

But even the underlying mathematics have been tricky. Girard's Paradox broke Martin-Löf's type theory, which is why in these dependently typed proof assistants you have to deal with the bizarre "Tower of Universes"; and Girard's Paradox is an analogue of Russell's Paradox which broke more naive set theories. And then Russell himself and his system of universal mathematics was very famously struck down by Gödel.

But we've definitely gotten it right this time...

[0] https://github.com/coq/coq/issues/4294

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