Reading up on Lean
9 deep · digging since dec 17, 25
- How Terry Tao Became an Evangelist for AI in Math
Terry Tao champions combining human insight, AI, and the Lean proof assistant to enable massive, verified mathematical collaborations.
- They Spent Years on a Math Problem. Then They Were Scooped by A.I.
An AI system called Gauss completed a mathematical proof formalization in five days, outpacing a human team that had worked for two years, raising concerns about the future role of mathematicians.
- All Lean Books and Where to Find Them
A personal guide lists and reviews nine Lean 4 books, offering subjective opinions and suggested learning paths.
- AI is doing something weird to Science
Scientific discovery emerges from a loop of human question-posing, LLM proposal, external verification, and human curation, not from AI alone.
- When AI writes the software, who verifies it?
The Hacker News discussion argues that as AI writes more code, formal verification tools like Lean must scale to ensure correctness and trustworthiness.
- Don't waste your back pressure ·
Providing AI agents with automated feedback loops (back pressure) enables them to self-correct on long-horizon tasks, increasing engineer leverage.
- Test, don't just verify
Testing is argued to be more practical than formal verification, but commenters are divided on AI’s role in making verification mainstream.
- Test, don't (just) verify
AI-assisted formal verification shows promise but faces limitations — autoformalization trust, proof assistant speed, and model complexity — making random testing a necessary complement.
- AI will make formal verification go mainstream
Formal verification will become mainstream as AI coding agents leverage proof systems like Lean for validation, according to a Hacker News discussion.