Thierry Coquand

Thierry Coquand

We report an experiment in autoformalisation of Gödel's second incompleteness theorem in Agda using Claude. The theorem is formalised for Church's Basic Recursive Arithmetic (BRA), following the proof outline given in Guard's 1963 lecture notes. The entire Agda development, comprising approximately 50,000 lines and containing no postulates, was produced through interaction with Claude; the author did not write any Agda code. Beyond the formalisation itself, the project provides a case study of the strengths and limitations of current large language models in mathematics. An initial autonomous attempt based on a theorem of Rose failed because the theorem is false; the resulting formal development produced by Claude established a statement superficially resembling Gödel's theorem but mathematically unrelated to it. This failure was traced to an insufficient specification of the internal provability predicate, illustrating how an LLM may reason correctly from an incorrect formal specification. The final development follows Guard's proof and required the reconstruction of several implicit mathematical arguments, including the role of the internal numeral-encoding operation and the interaction between substitution and numeral closure. The resulting formalisation clarifies a number of details left implicit in the original presentation and provides a fully machine-checked proof of Gödel's second incompleteness theorem for BRA.

Thierry Coquand, Bas Spitters

For most purposes, one can replace the use of Rolle's theorem and the mean value theorem, which are not constructively valid, by the law of bounded change. The proof of two basic results in numerical analysis, the error term for Lagrange interpolation and Simpson's rule, however seem to require the full strength of the classical Rolle's Theorem. The goal of this note is to justify these two results constructively, using ideas going back to Ampère and Genocchi.

Steve Awodey, Evan Cavallo, Thierry Coquand et al.

We develop a constructive model of homotopy type theory in a Quillen model category that classically presents the usual homotopy theory of spaces. Our model is based on presheaves over the cartesian cube category, a well-behaved Eilenberg-Zilber category. The key innovation is an additional equivariance condition in the specification of the cubical Kan fibrations, which can be described as the pullback of an interval-based class of uniform fibrations in the category of symmetric sequences of cubical sets. The main technical results in the development of our model have been formalized in a computer proof assistant.

Thierry Coquand, Jonas Höfer, Christian Sattler

There have recently been several developments in synthetic mathematics using extensions of dependent type theory with univalence and higher inductive types: simplicial homotopy type theory, synthetic algebraic geometry and synthetic Stone duality. We provide a foundation of higher sheaf models of type theory in a constructive metatheory and, in particular, build constructive models of these formal systems.