Welcome to Prove-It!

Prove-It is a tool for proving and organizing general theorems using Python.

Prove-It uses a powerful yet simple approach to theorem-proving.

Prove-It is not designed with automation as the primary goal. The primary goal is flexibility in order to be able to follow, ideally, any valid and complete (indivisible) chain of reasoning.

To that end, users can write additional Python scripts to make their own mathematical operations and LaTeX formatting rules. Axioms are statements that are taken to be true without proof. They can be added by the user at will in order to define their new mathematical objects and operations. Users can also add theorems that are to be proven. Theorems may be proven in any order. Theorem proofs are constructed in Jupyter notebooks (interactive Python sessions in a web browser). These notebooks render LaTeX-formatted mathematical expressions inline. Proofs are constructed by invoking axioms and other theorems and employing fundamental derivation steps (modus ponens, hypothetical reasoning, specialization, generalization, or axiom elimination). Axioms and theorems may be invoked indirectly via convenience methods or automation (methods that are automatically invoked when attempting to prove something or as side-effects when something is proven). Theorem proofs and their axiom/ theorem dependencies are stored in a kind of database (filesystem based). This database is used to prevent circular logic. It also allows users to track axioms and unproven theorems required by any particular proof. Convenience methods and automation tools to aid future proofs may be added and may utilize new axioms/theorems. Mathematical objects and operations, axioms, and theorems are organized into built-in and user-defined theory packages.

Visit http://pyproveit.org to view the Prove-It-generated web pages.
You can also read our introductory paper.

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Installation instructions

1. Make sure you have the required packages installed:

   • Python3.7 (installing a distribution such as Anaconda is recommended)
   • Jupyter (included in a distribution such as Anaconda)
   • LaTeX distribution (e.g. MiKTeX or TeX Live)
   • The qcircuit LaTeX package which may be acquired from CTAN (or disable the quantum theory package in Prove-It).

2. Run:

   python setup.py develop
   

   to install a link to the source tree in your python path. We only support this "develop" installation at this time because of the way that the Prove-It database works in the filesystem. In any case, if you might want to make any contributions to the ever-expanding proveit packages, this "develop" installation will allow you to do that development (altering source code of the installed package).

3. Run:

   python build.py --essential
   

   to execute Jupyter notebooks that will define axioms and theorems of each theory package as well as commonly used expressions. You will then be able to execute any notebook in the system as well as experiment on your own. Currently, this takes about 10 minutes on a single core. Use the "--help" option to see other "build" options (for example, python build.py --download will essentially download the entire contents of the pyproveit.org website). It is also possible to execute the build.py script using multiple cores with mpi4py. For example, if you have 4 cores available in your system and mpi/mpi4py is installed, mpirun -np 4 build.py --essential will build the essential theory package notebooks using 3 active cores (one core will assign tasks to the other three).

   To disable the quantum physics package (and alleviate the need to install the qcircuit LaTeX package), remove "quantum" from packages/proveit/physics/_sub_theories_.txt.

4. It is intended that theory packages continue to be added and updated to cover an ever-expanding range of mathematical knowledge. Theory packages may have cross dependencies (as long as there is no circular reasoning in any particular proof). Classes/objects that should be accessible externally should be imported in the __init__.py file of the top-level package, and they should be accessed, externally, at this top level. For example, the Or class is contained in the python file

   proveit.logic.booleans.disjunction.or_op.py

   but it can and should be accessed via the import command

   from proveit.logic import Or 
   

   In this way, the sub-package structure can be useful for organization purposes without being cumbersome to the user.

   Here is the current list of top-level packages under development, with brief descriptions:

   _core_	Core Prove-It constructs required used to construct/verify proofs.
   _core_expr_types_	Theory package with axioms/theorems pertaining to some of the core expression types.
   logic	Theory package for boolean arithmetic, equality, and set theory.
   numbers	Theory package for arithmetic and number theory concepts.
   relations	Some generic routines for search/sorting among transitive relationships.
   trigonometry	Yet to be a theory package pertaining to trigonometry.
   linalg	Yet to be a theory package pertaining to linear algebra.
   statistics	Yet to be a theory package pertaining to statistics.
   physics	Currently just things related to proving the correctness of the Quantum Phase Estimation algorithm at an abstract level. (This was implemented in an older version of Prove-It; redoing it more properly in the current version is in progress.)

5. The tutorial notebooks in the tutorial folder are in progress.
   It has numbered Jupyter notebooks (and html versions for convenience) that introduce Prove-It concepts in an appropriate order. There are also "demonstration" notebooks/html in the various theory packages with specific information about that package. A particularly useful one is

   proveit/logic/equality/_demonstrations_.ipynb

   You can also look at existing proofs for examples. Each theory package has a _theorems_.ipynb notebook. The theory name hyperlinks to a proof notebook for that theorem which may or may not be complete. Note that Prove-It allows "unproven theorems" to be used as "conjectures", so some useful theorems exist without being proven as the system continues to develop.

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Version History
12 Feb. 2017	Moved repository to github.com/PyProveIt/Prove-It.
12 Jan. 2017 - v0.3	The code is now hosted on gitlab-ex.sandia.gov to make it accessible to collaborators.