A wiki for mathematical theorems
A dream I’ve had for some time is to build a wiki for mathematical proofs. It would be sort of like Stack Exchange / Quora – people would post conjectures, and the answers would be in the form of a formal proof, automatically verified by the site.
You could link to proven theorems as lemmas in your proof. A conjecture could have several different proofs. The conjectures/theorems and proofs would all be voted on, tagged, and have English text explaining the steps in addition to the logical formulation.
This site would essentially be the Wikipedia of mathematics. If successful, it will become a place where anyone can find important theorems in a specific field, or build new theorems formally from smaller building blocks, validating their correctness.
I won’t have time to build it in the very near future, but I’m juggling the idea in my head nonetheless. A few open questions:
- Do you think such a site would be useful?
- Does something like this already exists?
- Is it even practical?
- Where would you start?
- What programming language / framework would you use for this?
- Any other helpful ideas?
- And finally … do you want to collaborate with me on this?
Update – Please see also this cross-post I did to Quora. It seems the problem is a lot more complicated than I had first imagined. I wonder if it fits as a doctorate thesis…
In any case, it requires a lot of research, not just coding. Perhaps someday.
