IsarMathLib 1.24.0: Update to Isabelle2022

A new version of Isabelle got released a couple of days ago and this version updates IsarMathLib to Isabelle2022. The Isabelle/ZF logic that IsarMathLib is based on is not actively developed, which has a good side that there are no changes and upgrades like this are easy and problem-free.

There is a little bit of formalized mathematics added in this IsarMathLib release as well. I added a couple of results from general topology that I always considered neat and elegant: a characterization of Hausdorff spaces as those for which the diagonal is closed in the product topology on , the fact that the graph of a function into a Hausdorff space is closed in and that two continuous functions into a Hausdorff space are equal on a closed set.

Another theorem added is related to abstract neighborhood systems. IsarMathLib had had a formalization of the fact that if one has a neighborhood system on one can construct a topology on and vice versa: starting from a topology we can define a natural neighborhood system. In this release I added a theorem asserting that if we start from a neighborhood system, create a topology from it, then create it’s natural neighborhood system, we get back the original neighborhood system.

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IsarMathLib 1.23.0: Rewrite of the presentation layer in F#

I wrote the original isar2html tool 13 years ago in Haskell as a way to learn the language. Since then I was extending it and fixing bugs. Coming back once or twice a year to a language that I was not using professionally had quite a bit of overhead just to recall how the things worked and reconstruct the development environment. As it happened I changed jobs in April this year and the new job required F#, so I decided to rewrite isar2html in F#, again as a way to learn the language. Of course as usual with that type of “big rewrite” (well, not that big here really) projects I underestimated the effort needed so I finished only about a week ago. Now I have exactly the same application implemented the same way in Haskell i F#.

	Haskell	F#
lines	2026	1692
words	10334	9239
characters	72006	79320

Basic verbosity statistics

The F# syntax is not as clean as Haskell’s so it was a surprise for me that the number of lines required was about 16% less in F# than in Haskell. Still, I would say that F# is slightly more verbose as the total number of characters was 10% higher in F#. Translating the parser of the subset of the Isar formal proof language that is used in IsarMathLib was almost mechanical and boring thanks to FParsec, which is the F# clone of Haskell’s Parsec parser library. I am especially happy with the result of that part of the project – the parsing errors were difficult to debug in Haskell. FParsec has better diagnostics built in – in case of failure it shows the backtracking information which helps a lot to pinpoint the problem in the text being parsed.

On the mathematics side in this release I have added a theorem stating that an ordered loop valued metric space is T₂.

Summing up in Kaitai Struct

I recently wanted to understand the Parquet binary format so I attempted to write a specification for it in Kaitai Struct. Kaitai Struct is a declarative binary format specification language, embedded in YAML. After writing such specification for a format one can generate parsers for it in several supported languages. Another thing that one can use such specification for is to visualize various elements of the format in the Kaitai Web IDE, which shows output somewhat similar to what Wireshark shows for network protocols. That’s what I want to use (if I ever finish the spec).

One stumbling block that I encountered was related to the way a SchemaElement is encoded in Parquet. A SchemaElement is a struct with a couple of fields selected from a fixed collection. The fields have numerical identifiers which are not provided directly but through deltas between their values. To obtain actual field id one has to compute the sum of the deltas provided (as 4-bit integers) in the file. For a while it was unclear if there is a way to encode such sum in Kaitai Struct and there was an issue about it on Kaitai GitHub repository opened more that four years ago. However, some three weeks ago cher-nov came up with a solution to this problem and posted it to the issue linked above. In this post I want to present an application of this solution to a toy format as another example that one can look at.

IsarMathLib 1.22.1: Update to Isabelle2021-1

This release updates IsarMathLib to Isabelle2021-1. There was actually not much to update – only a couple of places in the informal text that referenced Isabelle2021 now reference Isabelle2021-1. The main difference is in the HTML presentation that Isabelle generates from IsarMathLib sources. This presentation improved somewhat and now has links to referenced theorems in proofs. In one respect it is even better than the presentation at the isarmathlib.org site – the locale names in the statements of theorems are linked to the definitions, which is a feature missing on isarmathlib.org. I remember some statements by Makarius Wentzel on the Isabelle mailing list that the goal is the “publication quality” of officially generated HTML presentation. I hope that this includes what I think is needed the most – folding of structured proofs, support for mathematical notation with custom symbols and options for reduction of syntactic noise so that characters like the question mark or the quotes separating the object logic statements are omitted. When this happens I would be happy to retire the tool that generates isarmathlib.org HTML files. I wrote that tool 14 years ago with only a scant knowledge of HTML, CSS or Java Script and the web pages it generates are probably hopelessly old-style.

In other news, Pedro Sánchez Terraf announced that his team has completed a formalization of the independence of CH in Isabelle/ZF. This is a good news for IsarMathLib as well. Isabelle/ZF is used by very few people and I worry that at some point the Isabelle team stops supporting it, which would be the end of IsarMathLib. Every application like this makes it less likely.

IsarMathLib 1.22.0: Uniform covers part II

The material added in this release is again about uniform spaces, more specifically about the equivalence of defining uniform space through (diagonal) uniformities and through uniform covers. The previous release concluded with the theorem stating that if is a family of uniform covers of then the following collection of subsets of is a (diagonal) uniformity:

.

This shows that if we define a uniform space through a family of uniform covers then we can always get the usual definition by transforming that family into a uniformity.

The current release adds the dual fact (unicov_from_uniformity): if is a uniformity on then the following collection of covers of is a family of uniform covers:

.

The next two theorems show that these two transformations are inverses of each other.

I should probably quote sources for my formalization so that not to create an impression that I claim I am inventing some new stuff here. However the truth is that I found the Willard’s “General Topology” book that I bought for this nearly useless. So I ended up mostly getting definitions and facts from the “Uniform cover definition” section on the Wikipedia page on uniform spaces, and figuring out the proofs by myself. The only exception was a nice (even if not completely correct) proof that barycentric refinement of a barycentric refinement is a star refinement by Henno Brandsma that I found on Stack Exchange and converted to the bary_bary_star lemma.

Other news

IsarMathLib 1.21.0: Uniform covers

There are three approaches to defining uniform spaces. The first one, through diagonal uniformities is presented in IsarMathLib in the UniformSpace_ZF theory. This release adds a theory about defining uniform spaces through uniform covers.

Consider a set with its powerset (the set of subsets) . A collection of subsets of whose union is equal to is called a cover of . So, we can define the set .

For a set and a collection of of subsets of we can define the star of in as .

For two covers we say that the cover is a star-refinement of the cover and write if for every we can find a such that is contained in .

Finally we are able to define uniform covers. This notion is a bit tricky as there is really no separate notion of a uniform cover. If we look at cover of we cannot say if this is a uniform cover or not. What actually is defined is a family of uniform covers. A member of such family can only be called a uniform cover if it is clear from the context what family of uniform covers it belongs to.

A nonempty collection of covers of is called a family of uniform covers iff the following two conditions hold:

a) If , and , then

b) For every two covers we can find a cover that is a star-refinement of both and

This definition is slightly different that the one on the Wikipedia page on uniform spaces, which specifically requires that the trivial cover is a member of . However, since every cover is a star-refinement of the trivial cover and is not empty, condition a) implies that .

The key fact here is that if is a family of uniform covers of then the following collection of subsets of is a (diagonal) uniformity:

In words, is the collection of supersets of sets of the form as ranges over .

In Willard’s “General Topology” book the proof that is a uniformity is left as a “straightforward exercise” for the reader. Typically that means that the proof is long and tedious and the author does not feel like typing all that down. In this case the proof is indeed of mostly straightforward “follow your nose” kind right up to the moment when given a set one needs to find a set such that (here is the composition of relation with itself). For that, I found the following identity useful:

It took me some effort to figure out this identity and I was ready to type the proof of that in Isabelle, split into two inclusions etc. To my amazement though Isabelle accepted this fact without an explicit proof, only with the reference to the definition of star. This was probably the most unclear to me fact that was obvious to Isabelle that I have seen writing proofs for IsarMathLib so far. I left the proof of this identity as an exercise for the reader. This time the straightforwardness of this fact got certified by Isabelle.

Which brings us to the subject of

Automation in proof assistants

IsarMathLib 1.20.0: Ordered loops and loop valued metrics

Just to be clear, the loops in the title are algebraic structures and are not related to continuous images of circles or flow control constructs in programming languages.

Some time ago I got curious about a minimal setup in which a (pseudo) metric defined on a set would result in making this set a topological space. It turned out that if the metric is defined as a function with values in an partially ordered group we can use the standard definition of an open disk and the collection of unions of such open disks is a topology. However, I noticed then that this should be possible to be pushed a step farther and one should be able to define a metric as a function valued in an ordered loop and still get a topological space. In this release I added some material on ordered loops and rewrote the metric spaces section to be based on metrics valued in ordered loops.

Loops (the algebraic structures) are similar to groups, except that their binary operation does not have to be associative (I wrote more about loops in the previous post). An ordered loop (see for example Lattice-ordered loops and quasigroups by T. Evans) is a loop with a partial order such that if and only if and if and only if . The “if and only if” is worth noting here as this is different from the ordered group definition where one-sided implications are sufficient (I lost a couple of hours working with a wrong definition).

IsarMathLib 1.19.0: Loops

This release adds a theory file about loops. Loops (the kind we talk about here, not to be confused with for example loop algebras) are algebraic structures that are almost like groups, except that we don’t require the operation to be associative. Wikipedia has a nice picture illustrating dependencies between various algebraic structures between magmas and groups which I copy below:

As the picture shows we get a loop when we take a quasigroup and require that an identity (a neutral element of the operation) exists. It can be shown that that identity is unique in the loop. If we denote the loop identity as , then we can define the left and right inverses of a loop element as the only solutions to the equations and . In a loop these inverses do not have to be the same in general. If the loop operation is associative then we get a group and the left and right inverses unify to become the group inverse.

IsarMathLib 1.18.0: Quasigroups

In this release I added a small theory about quasigroups.

A quasigroup is a set with a binary operation (usually written with the multiplicative notation) that supports a certain kind of “divisibility”: every equation of the form or has a unique solution. So, a quasigroup is like a group except we do not require associativity or existence of a neutral element. If we denote those solution as and respectively we get the identities and by definition and, with the uniqueness, we get and , which may serve as an alternative definition of quasigroup.

According to this paper “One of the mathematical subfields where automated theorem provers are heavily used is the field of quasigroup and loop theory”.

IsarMathLib 1.17.0: Real numbers as a metric and topological space

In this release I added a new theory about real numbers. It’s mostly about setting up notation and validating other contexts (related to ordered fields, rings, groups, metric spaces etc.) so that theorems formulated in those contexts can be used when considering real numbers. At the end there are two theorems about the distance function being a metric and one stating that the collection of unions of open disks is a topology on reals.

IsarMathLib had been upgraded to Isabelle2021 in the previous release 1.16.1 (not announced on this blog) but at that time I didn’t notice that the proof documents were not generated properly. The pdf files generated by Isabelle didn’t get the formal text right, some symbols (like and , very important in mathematics based on set theory) were replaced by some placeholder symbol. Errors related to LaTeX are difficult to debug in Isabelle (at least for me), but this time I was lucky. The Isabelle2021 release notes contained information that the “The standard LaTeX engine is now lualatex, according to settings
variable ISABELLE_PDFLATEX.” . Indeed changing the ISABELLE_PDFLATEX="lualatex --file-line-error" line in the settings file back to ISABELLE_PDFLATEX="pdflatex -file-line-error" like it was in Isabelle2020 fixed the problem.