# Formalizing Gardam's disproof of Kaplansky's Unit Conjecture

A little over an year ago, Giles Gardam disproved a long-standing conjecture, often called the Kaplansky Unit Conjecture. This was a striking result – the statement was a simple and basic one, it had a long history, and it was one of a cluster of related conjectures with important relations to many areas (including the Whitehead conjecture in topology). Gardam’s work is published in the Annals of Mathematics.

Anand Rao Tadipatri and I have formalized Gardam’s disproof in lean 4. We used lean 4 as a proof assistant, but also took advantage of its being a (full fledged and really nice) programming language. This post is an account of the Unit conjecture and our formalization of it.

# Some things I learnt from Dennis Sullivan

This post is to celebrate the Abel prize awarded to Dennis Sullivan. Sullivan is not only one of the deepest and broadest mathematicians, but also one of the most inspiring – in particular to me. I learnt much from him during my three years at Stony Brook and during his two visits to India. This is a somewhat whimsical account of some of this, with quotes from memory (hence error prone). Some stuff is general and some more technical.

Since much of this is about the process of mathematics it should also be useful for automated theorem proving – my excuse for posting this here 😃.

# Forward Reasoning in Lean 4

I describe here my experiments with forward reasoning (reasoning from the premises), as well as mixed reasoning (reasoning both from the premises and from the conclusion) in Lean 4. The code for this is in the Lean-Loris repository. This code (and especially the ideas in it) is a successor to my scala code in ProvingGround.

# SAT Solver-Prover in Lean 4

The Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) asks whether a finite set of formulas in Boolean (i.e., true or false valued) variables $P$, $Q$,… has a solution. The formulas are built from the variables using logical operations such as $\vee$ (and), $\wedge$ (or) and $\neg$ (not).

# Sat Solving

To better understand the SAT (i.e., boolean satisfiability) problem and SAT solvers, I decided to implement a basic one. I was pleasantly surprised that wikipedia has enough details to implement the so called DPLL algorithm quite easily, with even some improvements described in wikipedia. Even better, in the case when there was no solution, the same algorithm gives a proof that there is no solution. The proof that there is no solution was based on resolution due to Davis-Putnam — so the algorithm gives as a bonus a proof that resolution is refutation complete for propositional calculus.

# Automating Mathematics India

I have created a google group meant for informal discussions among those interested in Automated Theorem Proving. This is aimed mainly at those in/from India, but everyone interested in the topic is of course welcome.

# Solving (but not proving?) Pappus

Thanks to some very nice work done by Anand Tadipatri after he read the previous post on proving theorems using SMT solvers, we find that in a sense the theorem of Pappus can be solved (but, so far at least, in some sense not proved) by Z3 — a happier conclusion than last time. I make this precise below, assuming the reader is familiar with the previous post.

# Knot so easy: Mathematical Proofs from High-performance Solvers?

Computers are able to solve an increasing range of problems, many of which were believed not long ago to require human intelligence. Yet there are fundamental limitations to what problems can be solved algorithmically, some known and other conjectured.

# Computer Assisted Proofs

Formal verification, a rapidly growing young field, is the computer assisted proving of results - ordinary mathematical theorems, as well as claims that pieces of hardware or software, network protocols, and mechanical and hybrid systems meet their specifications.