# Abstractions in mathematics

The word “abstraction” is vague in most contexts within the AI community. Has AlphaGo learned abstractions? I don’t think the question is relevant. AlphaGo clearly represents some knowledge of the game in its neural weights, but its interface with the world is purely through selecting Go moves. It doesn’t need to represent any specific type of abstraction in any specific way to play at a superhuman level.

In contrast, I consider the fundamental challenge of mathematical theorem proving to be that: sub-astronomic-sized proofs do not even exist unless appropriate abstractions are explicitly reified in the logic. Given a fixed set of abstractions, there is only a small set of theorems can feasibly be proved; worse, there are only a small number of theorems that can even feasibly be stated. The main challenge of mathematics is to develop the abstractions that permit short statements and proofs of the phenomena you want to establish.

Let’s make “abstraction” precise. There are three types of abstractions in mathematics:

• Definitional abstractions
• Declarative abstractions
• Procedural abstractions

A definitional abstraction is a new function that stands for a concept. For example, prime number is a definitional abstraction, since it corresponds to defining a function prime as follows:

$\text{definition prime}(n : \mathbb{N}) := n > 1 \wedge \forall m, \text{divides}(m, n) \to m = 1 \vee m = n$

Note that the body of a definition can depend on other definitional abstractions (e.g. prime depends on divides). Towers of definitions that depend on each other allow exponential compression of theorem statements. Even the statement of the trivial theorem $$(0 : \mathbb{R}) = (0 : \mathbb{R})$$ is unimaginably vast without definitional abstractions, since without the abstraction of $$\mathbb{R}$$ it would involve e.g. equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences, which in turn require more abstractions to state concisely, until eventually reaching the primitives of set theory.

A declarative abstraction is a theorem that has been proved, for example:

$\forall (n : \mathbb{N}), n > 1 \wedge \neg \text{prime}(n) \to \exists m, m > 1 \wedge m < n \wedge \text{divides}(m, n)$

The proofs of such theorems may use other theorems, and so towers of declarative abstractions that depend on each other allow exponential compression of proofs, on top of the compression acheived by definitional abstractions.

A procedural abstraction is a program (also called a tactic) that lives outside the logic itself and that automates some aspect of the proving process, in either a complete or a heuristic way. An example tactic is one that decides if two arithmetic expressions are equal modulo associativity and commutativity by sorting both sides and comparing for syntactic equality. Without such a procedural abstraction, one would need to tediously rewrite with the commutativity and associativity lemmas a number of times that scales superlinearly with the size of the terms.

Unlike the first two types of abstractions, procedural abstractions do not affect which theorems have sub-astronomic sized proofs in the underlying logic. Specifically, these procedures simply construct the proofs with fewer meta-logical actions. However, procedural abstractions can still dramatically reduce the size of the proof script, i.e. the sequence of tactics that must be invoked to construct the proof.

I think all approaches to using machine learning to help prove mathematical theorems that ignore this fundamental challenge will always be severely limited.

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