Literate proving: Presenting arid documenting formal proofs

Abstract

Literate proving is the analogue for literate programming in the mathematical realm. That is, the goal of literate proving is for humans to produce clear expositions of formal mathematics that could even he enjoyable for people to read whilst remaining faithful representations of the actual proofs. This paper describes maze, a generic literate proving system. Authors markup formal proof files, such as Mizar files, with arbitary XML and use maze to obtain the selected extracts and transform them for presentation, e.g. as LATEX. To aid its use, maze has built in transformations that include pretty printing and proof sketching for inclusion in LATEX documents. These transformations challenge the concept of faithfulness in literate proving but it is argued that this should be a distinguishing feature of literate proving from literate programming. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.