Writing Lamport-style 21st Century proofs, the easy way.
First off, please read Lamport's own words on the matter.
I like the idea of writing Lamport style proofs, and although I can do this on paper, or in LaTeX, or whatever, this just seems easier! Lamport himself notes repeatedly throughout his introduction to Lamport-style proofs that a hypertext approach is much easier to use than a static listing because it allows the reader to dig sufficiently deep for themselves to be convinced.
Lamproof itself is very, very simple. It is essentially an editable, collapsable list that has support for MathJax and checks that all the tree branches close in a true statement. But at the end of the day, that is surprisingly sufficient!
Lamproof saves its files as .proof
documents, which are plain text files that have a particular layout it knows how to read (plus the single control character, <<True>>
).
While Lamproof is pretty much ready to go for day-to-day use, there are a few niceties that I would like to add.
- Lamproof should be able to export to a simple LaTeX fragment so you can easily insert the resulting proof into a paper. After all, that's probably why you are writing the proof! This is not an immediately necessary feature, because many mathematicians are still attached to their prose-style proofs, and will wish to translate the Lamport proof accordingly.
- Lamproof should also export to an HTML fragment. After all, a Lamport proof is most useful if you can collapse and reveal the pieces you need to see, so why not enable exactly this feature? Having the ability to add a proof to a website either as supplementary material for a paper, or just because you wish your readers to understand your proof better, would be useful. Again, this feature is not necessary to functionailty, so is in the todo list!
Copyright 2017 Aaron Stockdill
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