Hi,

I have been thinking to this issue for years (decades?). In France we have this research agency INRIA which has been supporting the Coq project for decades, leading to a fairly "good quality software" (in my opinion). Say twenty years ago, the Coq project was targetting the computer science community and was not ready to "attack" the mathematical community. From this side, the picture seems much better nowadays.

A possible strategy toward the investment of the mathematical community is as follows:

------------------------

1- create a body tying (part of) this community with for instance (part of) the Coq project (and/or the Agda project, about which I know little).

2- obtain specific funding from a Research Agency (NSF, CNRS?) for partly formalized PhD fellowships, together with companion funding for the technical support (eg from the Coq team) to the (partial) formalization.

3- obtain good applications, coming from ouside this community.

4- select the winning applications regarding both the interest of the naked thesis, and the feasability of the (partial) formalization.

5- help collectively the success of each selected project.

6- Write assessments in particular for the formalization efforts of these newage doctors, so that they win positions whenever they deserve.

---------------------------

I leave it here.

ah




2016-06-12 10:04 GMT+02:00 Andrej Bauer <andrej...@andrej.com>:
Apologies for a slightly off topic post, but I think it is relevant to
many people on this list.

I just looked at some slides by William Stein, the author of Sage (an
open-source alternative to Mathematica) at
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4127

The conclusion is: it's impossible to make good quality software in
academia because there isn't enough money and because making software
doesn't give one any academic credit.

I am afraid formalization of math might fall into the same category,
unless we somehow elevate it to a "true science" level. A great deal
has been done in this respect recently by projects lead by Gonthier,
Hales and Voevodsky, but is it enough? Are we even making a dent?

At my department, for instance, the folk knowledge propagated from one
generation to another is that "someone" formalized "Landau's book" (I
suppose it was the Automath formlaization of Landau's Grundlagen der
Analysis by Jutting) which proves that "it can be done" but is
otherwise an intellectually barren exercise without academic value. I
still remember one of the professors saying this to the whole class
when was an undergraduate.

With kind regards,

Andrej

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