CV for Jesse Alama

Education

Doctor of Philosophy
Stanford University
Philosophy
2009

Formal Proofs and Refutations

Committee: Grigori Mints, Solomon Feferman, Johan van Benthem and Jeremy Avigad

Bachelor of Arts
University of Minnesota Morris
Mathematics, Computer Science, Philosophy
2001

Employment

Compiler Engineer
Igalia, Spain
November 2021 to present

Full Stack Developer
Vicampo.de GmbH, Germany
July 2015 to November 2021

Postdoctoral Researcher
Theory and Logic Group, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
January 2014 to June 2015

Postdoctoral Researcher
Center for Artificial Intelligence, New University of Lisbon, Portugal
September 2009 to September 2012

Assistant Editor
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, United States
November 2007 to present

Research Programmer
Qualitative Reasoning Group, Northwestern University, United States
September 2001 to August 2002

Programmer
Cycorp, Inc., United States
June 2001 to September 2001

Programmer
Cycorp, Inc., United States
May 2000 to August 2000

Programmer
Cycorp, Inc., United States
June 1999 to August 1999

Publications

Racket Weekend.
A ten-chap­ter short course on ba­sic Rack­et pro­gram­ming.
Server: Racket—Practical HTTP Programming with the Racket HTTP Server.
A step-by-step guide to get­ting start­ed with the built-in Rack­et HTTP serv­er, with a sam­ple web ap­pli­ca­tion and its func­tion­al­i­ty built up in pieces. Sur­vey of a num­ber of third-par­ty li­braries that will prob­a­bly be used heav­i­ly by most web apps writ­ten in Rack­et.
Axiomatizing Jaśkowski's discussive logic D2, Stu­dia Log­i­ca 106(6), 2018, pp. 1163–1180.
We out­line the rather com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry of at­tempts at ax­iom­a­tiz­ing Jaśkows­ki's dis­cus­sive log­ic D2 and show that some clar­i­ty can be had by pay­ing close at­ten­tion to the lan­guage we work with. We then ex­am­ine the prob­lem of ax­iom­a­tiz­ing D2 in lan­guages in­volv­ing dis­cus­sive con­junc­tions. Specif­i­cal­ly, we show that re­cent at­tempts by Ciu­ciu­ra are mis­tak­en. Fi­nal­ly, we present an ax­iom­a­ti­za­tion of D2 in the lan­guage Jaśkows­ki sug­gest­ed in his sec­ond pa­per on dis­cus­sive log­ic, by fol­low­ing a re­mark of da Cos­ta and Du­bika­jtis. We also deal with an in­ter­est­ing vari­ant of D2, in­tro­duced by Ciu­ciu­ra, in which nega­tion is also tak­en to be dis­cus­sive.
From absolute to affine geometry in terms of point-reflections, midpoints, and collinearity, Note di Matem­at­i­ca 36(1), 2016, pp. 11–24.
We in­ves­ti­gate equa­tion­al the­o­ries ex­pressed in terms of the point-re­flec­tion op­er­a­tion \sig­ma and the mid­point op­er­a­tion μ that lie strict­ly be­tween the ab­solute and the affine the­o­ry, prov­ing a num­ber of de­pen­den­cies and in­de­pen­den­cies in the process. Sev­er­al uni­ver­sal the­o­ries en­larged with the collinear­i­ty pred­i­cate also lie strict­ly be­tween the ab­solute and the affine the­o­ry. The in­de­pen­dence mod­els and sev­er­al proofs were ob­tained by Tipi, an ag­gre­gate of au­to­mat­ic the­o­rem provers. To show that no set of equa­tions with at most three vari­ables can ax­iom­a­tize the affine the­o­ry is left as an open prob­lem.
Automating Leibniz's theory of concepts and .
Our com­pu­ta­tion­al meta­physics group de­scribes its use of au­to­mat­ed rea­son­ing tools to study Leib­niz's the­o­ry of con­cepts. We start with a re­con­struc­tion of Leib­niz's the­o­ry with­in the the­o­ry of ab­stract ob­jects (hence­forth ob­ject the­o­ry). Leib­niz's the­o­ry of con­cepts, un­der this re­con­struc­tion, has a non-modal al­ge­bra of con­cepts, a con­cept-con­tain­ment the­o­ry of truth, and a modal meta­physics of com­plete in­di­vid­ual con­cepts. We show how the ob­ject-the­o­ret­ic re­con­struc­tion of these com­po­nents of Leib­niz's the­o­ry can be rep­re­sent­ed for in­ves­ti­ga­tion by means of au­to­mat­ed the­o­rem provers and fi­nite mod­el builders. The fun­da­men­tal the­o­rem of Leib­niz's the­o­ry is de­rived us­ing these tools.
Tarski geometry axioms and , For­mal Math­e­mat­ics 22(2), 2014, pp. 167–176.
This is the trans­la­tion of the Mizar ar­ti­cle con­tain­ing read­able Mizar proofs of some ax­iomat­ic geom­e­try the­o­rems for­mu­lat­ed by the great Pol­ish math­e­mati­cian Al­fred Tars­ki, and we hope to con­tin­ue this work.

The ar­ti­cle is an ex­ten­sion and up­grad­ing of the source code writ­ten by the first au­thor with the help of miz3 tool; his pri­ma­ry goal was to use proof check­ers to help teach rig­or­ous ax­iomat­ic geom­e­try in high school us­ing Hilbert's ax­ioms.

This is large­ly a Mizar port of Julien Nar­boux's Coq pseu­do-code. We par­tial­ly prove the the­o­rem that Tars­ki's (ex­treme­ly weak!) plane geom­e­try ax­ioms im­ply Hilbert's ax­ioms. Specif­i­cal­ly, we ob­tain Gup­ta's amaz­ing proof which im­plies Hilbert's ax­iom I1 that two points de­ter­mine a line.

The pri­ma­ry Mizar cod­ing was heav­i­ly in­flu­enced by ax­ioms of in­ci­dence geom­e­try. The orig­i­nal de­vel­op­ment was much im­proved us­ing Mizar ad­jec­tives in­stead of pred­i­cates only, and to use this ma­chin­ery in full ex­tent, we have to con­struct some mod­els of Tars­ki geom­e­try. These are list­ed in the sec­ond sec­tion, to­geth­er with ap­pro­pri­ate reg­is­tra­tions of clus­ters. Also mod­els of Tars­ki's geom­e­try re­lat­ed to real planes were con­struct­ed.

Computing with mathematical arguments.
Thanks to de­vel­op­ments in the last few decades in math­e­mat­i­cal log­ic and com­put­er sci­ence, it has now be­come pos­si­ble to for­mal­ize non-triv­ial math­e­mat­i­cal proofs in es­sen­tial­ly com­plete de­tail. we dis­cuss the philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems and prospects for such for­mal­iza­tion en­ter­pris­es. We show how some peren­ni­al philo­soph­i­cal top­ics and prob­lems in epis­te­mol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy of sci­ence, and phi­los­o­phy of math­e­mat­ics can be seen in the prac­tice of for­mal­iz­ing math­e­mat­i­cal proofs.
Checking proofs.
Con­tem­po­rary ar­gu­men­ta­tion the­o­ry tends to steer away from tra­di­tion­al for­mal log­ic. In the case of ar­gu­men­ta­tion the­o­ry ap­plied to math­e­mat­ics, though, it is prop­er for ar­gu­men­ta­tion the­o­ry to re­vis­it for­mal log­ic ow­ing to the in-prin­ci­ple for­mal­iz­abil­i­ty of math­e­mat­i­cal ar­gu­ments. Com­plete­ly for­mal proofs of sub­stan­tial math­e­mat­i­cal ar­gu­ments suf­fer from well-known prob­lems. But prac­ti­cal for­mal­iza­tions of sub­stan­tial math­e­mat­i­cal re­sults are now avail­able, thanks to the help pro­vid­ed by mod­ern au­to­mat­ed rea­son­ing sys­tems. In-prin­ci­ple for­mal­iz­abil­i­ty has be­come in-prac­tice for­mal­iz­abil­i­ty. Such ef­forts are a re­source for ar­gu­men­ta­tion the­o­ry ap­plied to math­e­mat­ics be­cause top­ics that might be thought to be es­sen­tial­ly in­for­mal reap­pear in the com­put­er-as­sist­ed, for­mal set­ting, prompt­ing a fresh ap­praisal.
Eliciting implicit assumptions of Mizar proofs by property omission, Jour­nal of Au­to­mat­ed Rea­son­ing 50, 2013, pp. 123–133.
When for­mal­iz­ing proofs with proof as­sis­tants, it of­ten hap­pens that back­ground knowl­edge about math­e­mat­i­cal con­cepts is em­ployed with­out the for­mal­iz­er ex­plic­it­ly re­quest­ing it. Such mech­a­nisms are war­rant­ed in the con­text of dis­cov­ery be­cause they can make prover ses­sions more ef­fi­cient (less time search­ing the li­brary) and can com­press proofs (the more knowl­edge that is im­plic­it­ly avail­able, the less needs to be ex­plic­it­ly said by the for­mal­iz­er). In the con­text of jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, though, im­plic­it knowl­edge may need to be made ex­plic­it. To study im­plic­it knowl­edge in proof as­sis­tants, one must first char­ac­ter­ize what im­plic­it knowl­edge should be made ex­plic­it. Then, once a class of im­plic­it back­ground knowl­edge is iden­ti­fied, one needs to de­ter­mine how to ex­tract it from proofs. When a class of im­plic­it knowl­edge is made ex­plic­it, we may then in­quire to what ex­tent the im­plic­it knowl­edge is need­ed for any par­tic­u­lar proof; it of­ten hap­pens that proofs can be suc­cess­ful even if some of the im­plic­it knowl­edge is omit­ted. In this note we de­scribe an ex­per­i­ment con­duct­ed on the Mizar Math­e­mat­i­cal Li­brary (MML) of for­mal math­e­mat­i­cal proofs con­cern­ing a par­tic­u­lar class of im­plic­it back­ground knowl­edge, name­ly, prop­er­ties of func­tions and re­la­tions (e.g., com­mu­ta­tiv­i­ty, asym­me­try, etc.). In our ex­per­i­ment we sep­a­rate, for each the­o­rem of the MML, the need­ed func­tion and re­la­tion prop­er­ties from the un­need­ed ones. Spe­cial at­ten­tion is paid to those func­tion and re­la­tion prop­er­ties that are sig­nif­i­cant in dis­cus­sions of foun­da­tions of math­e­mat­ics.
The simplest axiom system for plane hyperbolic geometry revisited, again, Stu­dia Log­i­ca 102(3), 2014, pp. 609–615.
De­pen­den­cies are iden­ti­fied in two re­cent­ly pro­posed first-or­der ax­iom sys­tems for plane hy­per­bol­ic geom­e­try. Since the de­pen­den­cies do not specif­i­cal­ly con­cern hy­per­bol­ic geom­e­try, our re­sults yield two sim­pler ax­iom sys­tems for ab­solute geom­e­try.
Complete independence of an axiom system for central translations, Note di Matem­at­i­ca 33(2), 2013, pp. 133–142.
A re­cent­ly pro­posed ax­iom sys­tem for Andr´e's cen­tral trans­la­tion struc­tures is im­proved upon. First, one of its ax­ioms turns out to be de­pen­dent (de­riv­able from the oth­er ax­ioms). With­out this ax­iom, the ax­iom sys­tem is in­deed in­de­pen­dent. Sec­ond, where­as most of the orig­i­nal in­de­pen­dence mod­els were in­fi­nite, fi­nite in­de­pen­dence mod­els are avail­able. More­over, the in­de­pen­dence proof for one of the ax­ioms em­ployed proof-the­o­ret­ic tech­niques rather than in­de­pen­dence mod­els; for this ax­iom, too, a fi­nite in­de­pen­dence mod­el ex­ists. For every ax­iom, then, there is a fi­nite in­de­pen­dence mod­el. Fi­nal­ly, the ax­iom sys­tem (with­out its sin­gle de­pen­dent ax­iom) is not only in­de­pen­dent, but com­plete­ly in­de­pen­dent.
A curious dialogical logic and its composition problem and , Jour­nal of Philo­soph­i­cal Log­ic 43, 2014, pp. 1065–1100.
Di­a­logue se­man­tics for log­ic are two-play­er log­ic games be­tween a Pro­po­nent who puts for­ward a log­i­cal for­mu­la φ as valid or true and an Op­po­nent who dis­putes this. An ad­van­tage of the di­a­log­i­cal ap­proach is that it is a uni­form frame­work from which dif­fer­ent log­ics can be ob­tained through only small vari­a­tions of the ba­sic rules. We in­tro­duce the com­po­si­tion prob­lem for di­a­logue games as the prob­lem of re­solv­ing, for a set S of rules for di­a­logue games, whether the set of S-di­a­log­i­cal­ly valid for­mu­las is closed un­der modus po­nens. Solv­ing the com­po­si­tion prob­lem is fun­da­men­tal for the di­a­log­i­cal ap­proach to log­ic; de­spite its sim­plic­i­ty, it of­ten re­quires an in­di­rect so­lu­tion with the help of sig­nif­i­cant log­i­cal ma­chin­ery such as cut-elim­i­na­tion. Di­rect so­lu­tions to the com­po­si­tion prob­lem can, how­ev­er, some­times be had. As an ex­am­ple, we give a set N of di­a­logue rules which is well-jus­ti­fied from the di­a­log­i­cal point of view, but whose set N of di­a­log­i­cal­ly valid for­mu­las is both non-triv­ial and non-stan­dard. We prove that the com­po­si­tion prob­lem for N can be solved di­rect­ly, and in­tro­duce a tableaux sys­tem for N.
Without E.
Di­a­logue games are a two-play­er game-based se­man­tics for a va­ri­ety of log­ics. The Pro­po­nent (Pro) as­serts an ini­tial for­mu­la φ; the Op­po­nent (Opp) dis­putes that φ is valid. The play­ers take turns, at­tack­ing or de­fend­ing log­i­cal for­mu­las. There are a few ways in which di­a­logues can be de­fined. There seems to be no unique for­mal­iza­tion, though one can clear­ly see fam­i­ly re­sem­blances among them. One rule that comes up of­ten is the so-called E rule, which says that Opp must re­spond to Pro's im­me­di­ate­ly pre­ced­ing move. The E rule is re­gard­ed as awk­ward and lack­ing a clear sig­nif­i­cance in any or­di­nary sense of di­a­logue. Its sole val­ue ap­pears to be that it fa­cil­i­tates proofs of ad­e­qua­cy (sound­ness and com­plete­ness). While ac­knowl­edg­ing its util­i­ty, one might nat­u­ral­ly wish to elim­i­nate the E rule, or at least re­place it by a rule that has in­tu­itive­ly greater plau­si­bil­i­ty. In some con­texts, it is known that E is in fact re­dun­dant (a set of rules with E has the same log­i­cal force as the rule­set with­out E), while in oth­er con­texts, E seems to be es­sen­tial. To­ward that end, this note in­ves­ti­gates a di­a­log­i­cal char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of clas­si­cal log­ic in which the E rule is re­laxed.
A machine-assisted view of paraconsistency. (preprint)
For a new­com­er, para­con­sis­tent log­ics can be dif­fi­cult to grasp. Even ex­perts in log­ic can find the con­cept of para­con­sis­ten­cy to be sus­pi­cious or mis­guid­ed, if not ac­tu­al­ly wrong. The prob­lem is that al­though they usu­al­ly have much in com­mon with more fa­mil­iar log­ics (such as in­tu­ition­is­tic or clas­si­cal log­ic), para­con­sis­tent log­ics nec­es­sar­i­ly dis­agree in oth­er parts of the log­i­cal ter­rain which one might have thought were not up for de­bate. Thus, one's log­i­cal in­tu­itions may need to be re­cal­i­brat­ed to work skill­ful­ly with para­con­sis­ten­cy. To get start­ed, one should clear­ly ap­pre­ci­ate the pos­si­bil­i­ty of para­con­sis­tent log­ics and the gen­uine­ness of the dis­tinc­tions to which para­con­sis­ten­cy points. For this pur­pose, one typ­i­cal­ly en­coun­ters ma­tri­ces in­volv­ing more than two truth val­ues to char­ac­ter­ize suit­able con­se­quence re­la­tions. In the eyes of a two-val­ued skep­tic, such an ap­proach might seem du­bi­ous. Even a non-skep­tic might won­der if there's an­oth­er way. To this end, to ex­plore the ba­sic no­tions of para­con­sis­tent log­ic with the as­sis­tance of au­to­mat­ed rea­son­ing tech­niques. Such an ap­proach has mer­it be­cause by del­e­gat­ing some of the log­i­cal work to a ma­chine, one's log­i­cal "bi­as­es" be­come ex­ter­nal­ized. The re­sult is a new way to ap­pre­ci­ate that the dis­tinc­tions to which para­con­sis­tent log­ic points are in­deed gen­uine. Our ap­proach can even sug­gest new ques­tions and prob­lems for the para­con­sis­tent log­ic com­mu­ni­ty.
Analysis of a detached axiom in Huntington's axiom system for non-oriented ordered lines. (preprint)
We im­prove upon Hunt­ing­ton's affine geom­e­try by show­ing that his in­de­pen­dence proofs can be, in some cas­es, sim­pli­fied. We car­ry out a sys­tem­at­ic in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the strict no­tion of be­tween­ness that Hunt­ing­ton em­ploys (the three ar­gu­ments are sup­posed to be dis­tinct) by com­par­ing it to McPhee's three ax­iom sys­tems for the same in­tend­ed class of struc­tures, which em­ploys weak be­tween­ness (the ar­gu­ments are per­mit­ted to be equal). Upon close­ly in­spect­ing the proof that McPhee's ax­iom sys­tems are equiv­a­lent to Hunt­ing­ton's (sub­ject of course to the de­f­i­n­i­tion of weak be­tween­ness in terms of strict and vice ver­sa), one finds sur­pris­ing­ly that McPhee's ax­iom sys­tems have quite dif­fer­ent re­la­tions to strict be­tween­ness.
Premise selection for mathematics by corpus analysis and kernel methods, , and , Jour­nal of Au­to­mat­ed Rea­son­ing 52, 2014, pp. 191–213.
Smart premise se­lec­tion is es­sen­tial when us­ing au­to­mat­ed rea­son­ing as a tool for large-the­o­ry for­mal proof de­vel­op­ment. This work de­vel­ops learn­ing-based premise se­lec­tion in two ways. First, a fine-grained de­pen­den­cy analy­sis of ex­ist­ing high-lev­el for­mal math­e­mat­i­cal proofs is used to build a large knowl­edge base of proof de­pen­den­cies, pro­vid­ing pre­cise data for ATP-based re-ver­i­fi­ca­tion and for train­ing premise se­lec­tion al­go­rithms. Sec­ond, a new ma­chine learn­ing al­go­rithm for premise se­lec­tion based on ker­nel meth­ods is pro­posed and im­ple­ment­ed. To eval­u­ate the im­pact of both tech­niques, a bench­mark con­sist­ing of 2078 large-the­o­ry math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lems is con­struct­ed, ex­tend­ing the old­er MPTP Chal­lenge bench­mark. The com­bined ef­fect of the tech­niques re­sults in a 50 % im­prove­ment on the bench­mark over the state-of-the-art Vam­pire/SInE sys­tem for au­to­mat­ed rea­son­ing in large the­o­ries.
Tipi: A TPTP-based theory development environment emphasizing proof analysis. (preprint)
In some the­o­ry de­vel­op­ment tasks, a prob­lem is sat­is­fac­to­ri­ly solved once it is shown that a the­o­rem (con­jec­ture) is de­riv­able from the back­ground the­o­ry (premis­es). De­pend­ing on one's mo­ti­va­tions, the de­tails of the de­riva­tion of the con­jec­ture from the premis­es may or may not be im­por­tant. In some con­texts, though, one wants more from the­o­ry de­vel­op­ment than sim­ply de­riv­abil­i­ty of the tar­get the­o­rems from the back­ground the­o­ry. One may want to know which premis­es of the back­ground the­o­ry were used in the course of a proof out­put by an au­to­mat­ed the­o­rem prover (when a proof is avail­able), whether they are all, in suit­able sens­es, nec­es­sary (and why), whether al­ter­na­tive proofs can be found, and so forth. The prob­lem, then, is to sup­port proof analy­sis in the­o­ry de­vel­op­ment; the tool de­scribed in this pa­per, Tipi, aims to pro­vide pre­cise­ly that.
Automated and human proofs in general mathematics: An initial comparison and .
First-or­der trans­la­tions of large math­e­mat­i­cal repos­i­to­ries al­low dis­cov­ery of new proofs by au­to­mat­ed rea­son­ing sys­tems. Large amounts of avail­able math­e­mat­i­cal knowl­edge can be re-used by com­bined AI/ATP sys­tems, pos­si­bly in un­ex­pect­ed ways. But au­to­mat­ed sys­tems can be also more eas­i­ly mis­led by ir­rel­e­vant knowl­edge in this set­ting, and find­ing deep­er proofs is typ­i­cal­ly more dif­fi­cult. Both large-the­o­ry AI/ATP meth­ods, and trans­la­tion and data-min­ing tech­niques of large for­mal cor­po­ra, have sig­nif­i­cant­ly de­vel­oped re­cent­ly, pro­vid­ing enough data for an ini­tial com­par­i­son of the proofs writ­ten by math­e­mati­cians and the proofs found au­to­mat­i­cal­ly. This pa­per de­scribes such an ini­tial ex­per­i­ment and com­par­i­son con­duct­ed over the 50000 math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­rems from the Mizar Math­e­mat­i­cal Li­brary.
Escape to Mizar from ATPs.
We an­nounce a tool for map­ping de­riva­tions pro­duced by the E the­o­rem prover to Mizar proofs. Our map­ping com­ple­ments ear­li­er work that gen­er­ates prob­lems for au­to­mat­ed the­o­rem provers from Mizar in­fer­ence check­ing prob­lems. We de­scribe the tool, ex­plain the map­ping, and show how we solved some of the dif­fi­cul­ties that arise in map­ping proofs be­tween dif­fer­ent log­i­cal for­malisms, even when they are based on the same no­tion of log­i­cal con­se­quence, as Mizar and E are (name­ly, first-or­der clas­si­cal log­ic with iden­ti­ty).
New developments in parsing Mizar.
The Mizar lan­guage aims to cap­ture math­e­mat­i­cal ver­nac­u­lar by pro­vid­ing a rich lan­guage for math­e­mat­ics. From the per­spec­tive of a user, the rich­ness of the lan­guage is wel­come be­cause it makes writ­ing texts more "nat­ur­al". But for the de­vel­op­er, the rich­ness leads to syn­tac­tic com­plex­i­ty, such as deal­ing with over­load­ing.

Re­cent­ly the Mizar team has been mak­ing a fresh ap­proach to the prob­lem of pars­ing the Mizar lan­guage. One aim is to make the lan­guage ac­ces­si­ble to users and oth­er de­vel­op­ers. In this pa­per we de­scribe these new pars­ing ef­forts and some ap­pli­ca­tions there­of, such as large-scale text refac­tor­ings, pret­ty-print­ing, HTTP pars­ing ser­vices, and nor­mal­iza­tions of Mizar texts.

Dependencies in formal mathematics: Applications and extraction for Coq and Mizar and .
Two meth­ods for ex­tract­ing de­tailed for­mal de­pen­den­cies from the Coq and Mizar sys­tem are pre­sent­ed and com­pared. The meth­ods are used for de­pen­den­cy ex­trac­tion from two large math­e­mat­i­cal repos­i­to­ries: the Coq Repos­i­to­ry at Ni­jmegen and the Mizar Math­e­mat­i­cal Li­brary. Sev­er­al ap­pli­ca­tions of the de­tailed de­pen­den­cy analy­sis are de­scribed and pro­posed. Mo­ti­vat­ed by the dif­fer­ent ap­pli­ca­tions, we dis­cuss the var­i­ous kinds of de­pen­den­cies that we are in­ter­est­ed in, and the suit­abil­i­ty of var­i­ous de­pen­den­cy ex­trac­tion meth­ods.
Metadata for a wiki of formalized mathematics.
In re­cent years wikis for for­mal math­e­mat­ics have ap­peared. For­mal math­e­mat­ics presents a num­ber of chal­lenges for the wiki per­spec­tive. To en­hance the qual­i­ty of the data in these wikis from the per­spec­tive of in­for­ma­tion ar­chi­tec­ture, we pro­pose some ex­ten­sions of ex­ist­ing for­mal math­e­mat­ics wikis to more prop­er­ly han­dle meta­da­ta.
Large formal wikis: Issues and solutions, and .
We present sev­er­al steps to­wards large for­mal math­e­mat­i­cal wikis. The Coq proof as­sis­tant to­geth­er with the CoRN repos­i­to­ry are added to the pool of sys­tems han­dled by the gen­er­al wiki sys­tem de­scribed in [10]. A smart re-ver­i­fi­ca­tion scheme for the large for­mal li­braries in the wiki is sug­gest­ed for Mizar/MML and Coq/CoRN, based on re­cent­ly de­vel­oped pre­cise track­ing of math­e­mat­i­cal de­pen­den­cies. We pro­pose to use fea­tures of state-of-the-art filesys­tems to al­low real-time cloning and sand­box­ing of the en­tire li­braries, al­low­ing also to ex­tend the wiki to a true mul­ti-user col­lab­o­ra­tive area. A num­ber of re­lat­ed is­sues are dis­cussed.
mizar-items: Exploring fine-grained dependencies in the Mizar Mathematical Library.
The MML is one of the largest col­lec­tion of for­mal­ized math­e­mat­i­cal knowl­edge that has been de­vel­oped with var­i­ous in­ter­ac­tive proof as­sis­tants. It com­pris­es more than 1100 "ar­ti­cles" sum­ming to near­ly 2.5 mil­lion lines of text, each con­sist­ing of a uni­fied col­lec­tion of math­e­mat­i­cal de­f­i­n­i­tions and proofs. Se­man­ti­cal­ly, it con­tains more than 50000 the­o­rems and more than 10000 de­f­i­n­i­tions ex­pressed us­ing more than 7000 sym­bols. It thus of­fers a fas­ci­nat­ing cor­pus on which one could car­ry out a num­ber of ex­per­i­ments. This note dis­cuss­es a sys­tem for com­put­ing fine-grained de­pen­den­cies among the con­tents of the MML.
Licensing the Mizar Mathematical Library, , , and .
The Mizar Math­e­mat­i­cal Li­brary (MML) is a large cor­pus of for­malised math­e­mat­i­cal knowl­edge. It has been con­struct­ed over the course of many years by a large num­ber of au­thors and main­tain­ers. Yet the le­gal sta­tus of these ef­forts of the Mizar com­mu­ni­ty has nev­er been clar­i­fied. In 2010, af­ter many years of loose de­lib­er­a­tions, the com­mu­ni­ty de­cid­ed to in­ves­ti­gate the is­sue of li­cens­ing the con­tent of the MML, there­by clar­i­fy­ing and crys­tal­liz­ing the sta­tus of the texts, the text's au­thors, and the li­brary's long-term main­tain­ers. The com­mu­ni­ty has set­tled on a copy­right and li­cense pol­i­cy that suits the pe­cu­liar fea­tures of Mizar and its com­mu­ni­ty. In this pa­per we dis­cuss the copy­right and li­cense so­lu­tions. We of­fer our ex­pe­ri­ence in the hopes that the com­mu­ni­ties of oth­er li­braries of for­malised math­e­mat­i­cal knowl­edge might take up the le­gal and sci­en­tif­ic prob­lems that we ad­dressed for Mizar.
Dialogue games for classical logic and .
We de­fine a class of di­a­logue games and prove that ex­is­tence of win­ning strate­gies for the Pro­po­nent in this class of games cor­re­sponds to va­lid­i­ty in clas­si­cal propo­si­tion­al log­ic. Many au­thors have stat­ed sim­i­lar re­sults with­out ac­tu­al­ly prov­ing the cor­re­spon­dence. We mod­i­fy the games used for in­tu­ition­is­tic log­ic giv­en by Fer­müller. We em­ploy stan­dard di­a­logue games and a stan­dard se­quent cal­cu­lus for clas­si­cal log­ic. The re­sult is a sim­ple cor­re­spon­dence be­tween di­a­logue games and clas­si­cal log­ic.
A wiki for Mizar: Motivation, Considerations, and Initial Prototype, and .
For­mal math­e­mat­ics has so far not tak­en full ad­van­tage of ideas from col­lab­o­ra­tive tools such as wikis and dis­trib­uted ver­sion con­trol sys­tems (DVCS). We ar­gue that the field could prof­it from such tools, serv­ing both new­com­ers and ex­perts alike. We de­scribe a pre­lim­i­nary sys­tem for such col­lab­o­ra­tive de­vel­op­ment based on the Git DVCS. We fo­cus, ini­tial­ly, on the Mizar sys­tem and its li­brary of for­mal­ized math­e­mat­ics.
Exploring Steinitz-Rademacher polyhedra: A challenge for automated reasoning tools.
This note re­ports on some ex­per­i­ments, us­ing a hand­ful of stan­dard au­to­mat­ed rea­son­ing tools, for ex­plor­ing Steinitz-Rademach­er poly­he­dra, which are mod­els of a cer­tain first-or­der the­o­ry of in­ci­dence struc­tures. This the­o­ry and its mod­els, even sim­ple ones, presents sig­nif­i­cant, geo­met­ri­cal­ly fas­ci­nat­ing chal­lenges for au­to­mat­ed rea­son­ing tools.
Euler's polyhedron formula in Mizar.
Euler's poly­he­dron for­mu­la as­serts for a poly­he­dron p that V - E + F = 2, where V, E, and F are, re­spec­tive­ly, the num­bers of ver­tices, edges, and faces of p. Mo­ti­vat­ed by I. Lakatos's phi­los­o­phy of math­e­mat­ics as pre­sent­ed in his Proofs and Refu­ta­tions, in which the his­to­ry of Euler's for­mu­la is used as a case study to il­lus­trate Lakatos's views, we for­mal­ized a proof of Euler's for­mu­la for­mu­la in the Mizar sys­tem. We de­scribe some of the no­table fea­tures of the proof and sketch an im­proved for­mal­iza­tion in progress that takes a deep­er math­e­mat­i­cal per­spec­tive, us­ing the ba­sic re­sults of al­ge­bra­ic topol­o­gy, than the ini­tial for­mal­iza­tion did.
A formal proof of Euler's polyhedron formula, Stud­ies in Log­ic, Gram­mar and Rhetoric 18(31), 2010, pp. 455–469.
Euler's poly­he­dron for­mu­la as­serts for a poly­he­dron p that V - E + F = 2, where V , E, and F are, re­spec­tive­ly, the num­bers of ver­tices, edges, and faces of p. This pa­per con­cerns a for­mal proof in the mizar sys­tem of Euler's poly­he­dron for­mu­la car­ried out by the au­thor. We dis­cuss the in­for­mal proof (Poin­caré's) on which the for­mal proof is based, the for­mal­ism in which the proof was car­ried out, no­table fea­tures of the for­mal­iza­tion, and re­lat­ed projects.
Euler's polyhedron formula, For­mal Math­e­mat­ics 16(1), 2008, pp. 7–17.
Euler's poly­he­dron the­o­rem states for a poly­he­dron p, that V E + F = 2, where V, E, and F are, re­spec­tive­ly, the num­ber of ver­tices, edges, and faces of p. The for­mu­la was first stat­ed in print by Euler in 1758. The proof giv­en here is based on Poin­caré's lin­ear al­ge­bra­ic proof, as adapt­ed by Imre Lakatos in the lat­ter's Proofs and Refu­ta­tions.

As is well known, Euler's for­mu­la is not true for all poly­he­dra. The con­di­tion on poly­he­dra con­sid­ered here is that of be­ing a ho­mol­o­gy sphere, which says that the cy­cles (chains whose bound­ary is zero) are ex­act­ly the bound­ing chains (chains that are the bound­ary of a chain of one high­er di­men­sion).

The present proof ac­tu­al­ly goes be­yond the three-di­men­sion­al ver­sion of the poly­he­dral for­mu­la giv­en by Lakatos; it is di­men­sion-free, in the sense that it gives a for­mu­la in which the di­men­sion of the poly­he­dron is a pa­ra­me­ter. The clas­si­cal Euler re­la­tion V E + F = 2 is cor­re­sponds to the case where the di­men­sion of the poly­he­dron is 3.

The main the­o­rem, ex­pressed in the lan­guage of the present ar­ti­cle, is

Sum al­ter­nat­ing−char­ac­ter­is­tic−se­quence(p) = 0,

where p is a poly­he­dron. The al­ter­nat­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic se­quence of a poly­he­dron is the se­quence

N−1, +N0, N1, …, −1dimp×Ndimp,

where Nk is the num­ber of poly­topes of p of di­men­sion k. The spe­cial case of dimp = 3 yields Euler's clas­si­cal re­la­tion. (N−1 and N3 will turn out to be equal, by de­f­i­n­i­tion, to 1.)

Two oth­er spe­cial cas­es are proved: the first says that a one-di­men­sion­al poly­he­dron that is a ho­mol­o­gy sphere con­sists of just two ver­tices (and thus con­sists of just a sin­gle edge); the sec­ond spe­cial case as­serts that a two-di­men­sion­al poly­he­dron that is a ho­mol­o­gy sphere (a poly­gon) has as many ver­tices as edges.

The vector space of subsets of a set based on symmetric difference, For­mal Math­e­mat­ics 16(1), 2008, pp. 1–5.
For each set X, the pow­er set of X forms a vec­tor space over the field Z2 (the two-el­e­ment field {0 , 1} with ad­di­tion and mul­ti­pli­ca­tion done mod­u­lo 2): vec­tor ad­di­tion is dis­joint union, and scalar mul­ti­pli­ca­tion is de­fined by the two equa­tions (1 · x := x, 0 · x := for sub­sets x of X).
The rank+nullity theorem, For­mal Math­e­mat­ics 15(3), 2007, pp. 137–142.
The rank+nul­li­ty the­o­rem states that, if T is a lin­ear trans­for­ma­tion from a fi­nite-di­men­sion­al vec­tor space V to a fi­nite-di­men­sion­al vec­tor space W, then dimV = rankT + nul­li­tyT, where rankT = dimimT and nul­li­tyT = dimkerT. The proof treat­ed here is stan­dard: take a ba­sis A of kerT and ex­tend it to a ba­sis B of V, and then show that dimimT is equal to |BA|, and that T is one-to-one on BA.

Teaching

Dialogical Logic (Assistant Instructor)
Institute for Logic, Language and Information, University of Amsterdam
2011

Type Theory (Instructor)
Department of Computer Science, New University of Lisbon
2010

Artificial Intelligence (Instructor)
Educational Program for Gifted Youth, Stanford University
2009

Computability and Logic (Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Stanford University
2006, 2008

First-order Logic (Graduate Teaching Assistant)
Stanford University
2006, 2007, 2008

Non-Euclidean Geometry (Instructor)
Educational Program for Gifted Youth, Stanford University
2007, 2008, 2009

Awards

Centennial Teaching Assistant Award
Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning
2008

Fulbright Scholar (Hungary)
United States Department of State
2002–2003

Scholar of the College
University of Minnesota Morris
2000

Links

Homepage
GitHub
Bluesky (roast)
arXiv
Mathematics Genealogy
ORCiD

Contact

Moltkestrasse 3d
55118 Mainz
Germany
hello@jessealama.net