Xena

xenaproject
9d ago

My team of post-docs funded by this Renaissance Philanthropy grant has constructed a dataset of 50 Lean statements, corresponding to 50 important recent mathematical theorems! The 50 theorems were all published in the Annals of Mathematics (a prestigious mathematical journal) … Continue reading →

It’s been an interesting few weeks for counterexamples. This post is basically my perspective of what has been going on in the world of formalization, AI tools and, in particular, counterexamples. Unit distance Two months ago today (20th May 2026), … Continue reading →

xenaproject
5/15/2026

I’m organizing a workshop in London on July 6th to 10th (2026) whose goal is to work on my EPSRC-funded project formalizing Fermat’s Last theorem in Lean. The initial aim of the project was to reduce FLT to theorems known … Continue reading →

xenaproject
2/9/2026

Let’s say that someone had a big pot of money, and wanted to use it to accelerate mathematical discovery. How might they go about doing this? The traditional approach Historically it has been governments who have been driving this agenda, … Continue reading →

[This is a guest post by Boris Alexeev. Now over to Boris.] I’m here to tell you about various exciting developments centering on Erdős problems, especially involving the formalization of old and new mathematics using artificial intelligence. Background As is … Continue reading →

xenaproject
8/3/2025

Setting the scene The 2025 International Mathematics Olympiad has come and gone. Reminder: this is an exam for high-school kids across the world (each country typically sends six kids), comprising of two 4.5-hour exams each containing three questions, so six … Continue reading →

xenaproject
3/16/2025

A month or two ago I wrote this post which expressed my frustration with various issues around private datasets as a way of measuring the mathematical abilities of language models. More generally I was frustrated about the difficulty of being … Continue reading →

xenaproject
2/9/2025

Undergraduate mathematicians usually have a hard time defining functions from quotients in Lean, because they have been taught a specific model for quotients in their classes, which is not the model that Lean uses. This post is an attempt to … Continue reading →

xenaproject
1/20/2025

My feed was recently clogged up with news articles reporting that Sam Altman thinks that AGI is here, or will be here next year, or whatever. I will refrain from giving even more air to this nonsense by linking to … Continue reading →

So I'm two months into trying to teach a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem to a computer. We already have one interesting story, which I felt was worth sharing. Continue reading →

xenaproject
1/20/2024

A huge amount happened in the Lean theorem prover community in 2023; this blog post looks back at some of these events, plus some of what we have to look forward to in 2024. Modern mathematics I personally am a … Continue reading →