@MartinEscardo We're at 4/6 as of today.

@iblech

@mkerjean

The following said above in this thread is indeed true:

* Supervisors are only human, too.
* They are unable to (1) read your mind, (2) manage their time, (2) remember much.

Despite all the above shortcomings, that apply to myself too, I love supervising.

And, remember, then, if you are a supervisor, students are only human, too. And (1)-(3) apply to them too. 🙂

So we are all in the same boat, and we should rather sail together enjoying our mutual company.

I am trying to verbalize to myself why I don't like autoformalization (say to get Claude to write Agda code for me).

As I have said repeatedly before, I use TypeTopology/Agda as a blackboard, to think about mathematical objects and their properties.

When I had Claude to do the experiment I reported earlier, I did get partial results, but the process was painful because Claude was thinking, not me.

The whole point, in my particular case, is to use TypeTopology with Agda to think about things, more than to get things done.

I sometimes feel that my style at odds with the way that Mathematics is traditionally written. A theorem like https://mathstodon.xyz/@jonmsterling/116934135318482820 this would, in a proper mathematics paper, be stated without proof because the proof is easy.

In my opinion, that practice (though defensible on the grounds that professional mathematicians generally make very few fatal mistakes) is a bit unfortunate. First of all, it makes it harder for a newcomer to see just *how* people prove things in an area (unless they are personally taught by an insider). Second of all, much of the beauty of mathematics is in the proof. Seeing that a proof works swimmingly without any difficult parts can provide confidence that the definitions are good.

I do sometimes read books and papers where a lot of proofs are left out, and then when I try to reconstruct them myself, I see that the results are true but the proofs are really really complicated in ways that could have been fixed with better definitions.

Another day, another theorem proved à la “equivalences without tears“ (https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11501 by @de_Jong_Tom). It took me about four hours to figure out how which type should be the ‘fulcrum’ of my nest of equivalences, but once I did that, it was easy because the diagram commuted definitionally. It never ceases to amaze me how well this works.

@jonmsterling It's funny. I mostly wrote this up in summer two years ago as a welcome change to other less fun things that had to be written up. I'm so glad folks find it helpful 🙂
(And naturally I use this technique in the plan for my final ESSLLI lecture.)

I think that if people have written formal proofs using LLMs and wish to claim them as contributions in their papers, they need to include some account of the methodology they used to ensure that the proof actually formalises the intended results. That would necessarily involve an audit chain of all *definitions* needed in the statements of the main results...

@andrejbauer Can you explain 3?

I was invited to speak at the Summer Conference on Topology 2026and its Applications in Split, Croatia, https://events.pmfst.unist.hr/sumtopo/

This is how I tried to explain the topos of countable reals to ordinary topologists: https://www.andrej.com/assets/slides/topology-in-the-topos-of-countable-reals.pdf

I did get a bunch of questions afterwards, which is a good sign. But the questions also showed how difficult it is to comprehend an alien topic. The idea of "internal" and "external" truth, paying attention to logic, detecting uses of excluded middle and choice – these are really hard for non-logicians.

@jeanas You can't (I think).

@flup The footnote is confusing. Hopefully this helps:

In general we have log_b x = log_k x / log_k b.

Hence, applying this with x = W, b = 2 and k = e, we get
log_2 W = log_e W / log_e 2 = ln W / ln 2 = (1 / ln 2) * ln W.

The factor the text refers to is this (1 / ln 2) which is approximately 1.4427.

@oantolin Thanks! It's a typo actually.

The teaching materials (first version) for my course "Introduction to Homotopy Type Theory / Univalent Foundations" at ESSLLI 2026 are now available at https://github.com/tomdjong/ESSLLI-2026/

I really enjoyed putting this together and naturally I (re)learnt a thing or two myself in the process!

Speaking of ESSLLI, there is still just over 1 week left (deadline: 18 July) to register for this year's European Summer School in #Logic, Language and Information.
https://2026.esslli.eu/

#TypeTheory #HoTT

I’m happy to announce that the 43rd Agda Implementors’ Meeting will take place in Rzeszów, Poland from 2026-10-12 to 2026-10-17 2026-10-19 to 2026-10-24 (Mon to Sat). Everyone interested in Agda is welcome to attend, no matter whether you are a veteran or a beginner, and whether you are working on Agda or in Agda. More information about the venue and the registration will appear soon on the wiki page at https://wiki.portal.chalmers.se/agda/Main/AIMXLIII.

Edit: the dates were moved by one week, it is now 19-24 October!

#Agda #DependentTypes #ProofAssistant

Excited about this one-day meeting on constructive and synthetic mathematics organized by Daniel Misselbeck-Wessel and Peter Schuster. Perhaps you happen to be around and want to drop by? :-)

I could offer hosting for the night before or after in nearby Augsburg.

Munich (Germany), July 17th.
https://danielwessel.github.io/cosy26/

@iblech @jdw I won't be around, but strongly agree otherwise!

@thmprover Maybe https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.01561 is also of interest.

@buchholtz

@zyang @ToucanIan Not British, but in Britain and young, I think @aref_mz likes snooker 🙂

@danielgratzer @VojtechStep I wish someone had told me about \looseness during my PhD.

@todd 😂