Section: Scientific Foundations

Type theory and formalization of mathematics

The calculus of inductive constructions is a branch of type theory that serves as a foundation for theorem proving tools, especially the Coq proof assistant. It is powerful enough to formalize complex mathematics, based on algebraic structures and operations. This is especially important as we want to produce proofs of logical properties for these algebraic structures, a goal that is only marginally addressed in most scientific computation systems.

The calculus of inductive constructions also makes it possible to write algorithms as recursive functional programs which manipulate tree-like data structures. A third important characteristic of this calculus is that it is also a language for manipulating proofs. All this makes this calculus a tool of choice for our investigations. However, this language is still being improved and part of our work concerns these improvements.