this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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There are proof assistants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_assistant that would encode a mathematical proof as code, and verify its correctness for you.
Writing completely formal proof is very painstaking, because it means we will need to flash out a lot and a lot of details (which are mostly trivial for experts) for computers to accept it, and we also need to know how to work with proof assistants.
Human proofs often ignore these details to make it readable, yet also make it more prone to mistakes. Whereas formalized prove in proof assistant can very rarely be wrong (unless there is an unlikely bug in the assistant kernel), but mostly unreadable (unless the proof is incredibly elegant).
So in general, translating good human proof to computer proof requires more expert labor than huge conceptual innovation, yet it usually require the steep learning curve of understanding the ins and outs of a proof assistant, which can take years of experience.
LLM used to be pretty bad at this because even filling in trivial details can quickly derail them. Recently a few flagship coding model are finally able to do this, albeit with a large amount of token consumption in thinking.
Fascinating. My godfather is a mathematician at a local university, I'll ask him whether this is something he runs into. I've heard him grumble about formatting his work in the past, but usually in the context of using Latex, which I gather is something else entirely.
Yeah LaTeX is a bit different, think about describing a process in MS Word, v.s. writing a program that performs such process on a computer: LaTeX is more like description aimed for human consumption, where as formal proof is more like a program that computers can rigorously execute.
Proof assistant have only attracted the attension of mathematicians very recently, thanks to the organization surrounding MathLib in Lean, and the promption of Terance Tao.
It also rides the AI train quite a bit, as AI have a tendency to confidently be wrong, having a computer to check its proof can be very useful.