Post #1471880
2023-11-27 16:20 UTC
@xenaproject @andrejbauer One thing this project has made me realize is that the mathematical side of the project - as encapsulated by writing and maintaining the Blueprint (as well as docstrings and comments) - is as important as the formalization side. The PFR project is short enough and elementary enough that I was able to write a blueprint (cribbed in large extent from the actual paper) in advance of most of the Lean formalization, but for a larger project the two would proceed in parallel, and one would need a significant group of people to develop the blueprint. However, the set of skills required for that is somewhat different - one can recruit mathematicians who are familiar with the content but have only minimal experience in Lean to work on tasks on the blueprint (similar to how PFR is distributing tasks for formalization), operating with only loose coordination with the formalization group who need competence in Lean but only minimal experience with the mathematics., For a large project there should also be a mostly separate administrator/moderator group that deals with coordination, structure, and the "big picture" rather than atomized formalization or documentation. (One can in principle work on more than side, but I found this to not be the optimal use of my time, also I tended to abuse the administrator privilege of pushing code without passing CI checks.)
With PFR I have started getting a few pull requests on the blueprint / docstring side of things that have also been valuable; but one key difference is that they require much more human review, in contrast with say filling in a Lean sorry for which one can largely outsource the review to the CI checks.
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@tao@mathstodon.xyz 2023-11-27 17:19
@xenaproject @andrejbauer p.s. for larger projects I can also imagine having a fourth "tactical" group devoted to developing relevant Lean tactics for the project. In PFR for instance we found ourselves repeatedly needing to verify that certain quantities were finite (this was an artefact of our probability theory being based on the Mathlib library for unsigned measures, which were allowed to take the value \(+\infty\)), and Heather Macbeth kindly supplied us with a useful `finiteness` tactic to resolve all these issues easily.