A tool to verify estimates, II: a flexible proof assistant
Published on: 2025-07-07 23:41:21
In a recent post, I talked about a proof of concept tool to verify estimates automatically. Since that post, I have overhauled the tool twice: first to turn it into a rudimentary proof assistant that could also handle some propositional logic; and second into a much more flexible proof assistant (deliberately designed to mimic the Lean proof assistant in several key aspects) that is also powered by the extensive Python package sympy for symbolic algebra, following the feedback from previous commenters. This I think is now a stable framework with which one can extend the tool much further; my initial aim was just to automate (or semi-automate) the proving of asymptotic estimates involving scalar functions, but in principle one could keep adding tactics, new sympy types, and lemmas to the tool to handle a very broad range of other mathematical tasks as well.
The current version of the proof assistant can be found here. (As with my previous coding, I ended up relying heavily on large lan
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