Agda UALib ↑

Preface


{-# OPTIONS --without-K --exact-split --safe #-}

module Preface where



To support formalization in type theory of research level mathematics in universal algebra and related fields, we present the Agda Universal Algebra Library (gitlab/ualib ), a library for the Agda proof assistant which contains statements and proofs of many foundational definitions and results from universal algebra. In particular, the library includes formal statements and proofs the First (Noether) Isomorphism Theorem and the Birkhoff HSP Theorem asserting that every variety is an equational class.

Agda is a programming language and proof assistant, or “interactive theorem prover” (ITP), that not only supports dependent and inductive types, but also provides powerful proof tactics for proving things about the objects that inhabit these types.

Vision and Goals

The idea for the UALib project originated with the observation that, on the one hand a number of basic and important constructs in universal algebra can be defined recursively, and theorems about them proved inductively, while on the other hand the types (of type theory—in particular, dependent types and inductive types) make possible elegant formal representations of recursively defined objects, and constructive (computable) proofs of their properties. These observations suggest that there is much to gain from implementing universal algebra in a language that facilitates working with dependent and inductive types.

Primary Goals

The first goal of UALib is to demonstrate that it is possible to express the foundations of universal algebra in type theory and to formalize (and formally verify) the foundations in the Agda programming language. We will formalize a substantial portion of the edifice on which our own mathematical research depends, and demonstrate that our research can also be expressed in type theory and formally implemented in such a way that we and other working mathematicians can understand and verify the results. The resulting library will also serve to educate our peers, and encourage and help them to formally verify their own mathematics research.

Our field is deep and wide and codifying all of its foundations may seem like a daunting task and a possibly risky investment of time and energy. However, we believe our subject is well served by a new, modern, constructive presentation of its foundations. Our new presentation expresses the foundations of universal algebra in the language of type theory, and uses the Agda proof assistant to codify and formally verify everything.

Secondary Goals

We wish to emphasize that our ultimate objective is not merely to translate existing results into a more modern and formal language. Indeed, one important goal is to develop a system that is useful for conducting research in mathematics, and that is how we intend to use our library once we have achieved our immediate objective of implementing the basic foundational core of universal algebra in Agda.

To this end, our intermediate-term objectives include

• developing domain specific “proof tactics” to express the idioms of universal algebra,
• incorporating automated proof search for universal algebra, and
• formalizing theorems emerging from our own mathematics research,
• documenting the resulting software libraries so they are usable by other working mathematicians.

For our own mathematics research, we believe a proof assistant equipped with specialized libraries for universal algebra, as well as domain-specific tactics to automate proof idioms of our field, will be extremely useful. Thus, a secondary goal is to demonstrate (to ourselves and colleagues) the utility of such libraries and tactics for proving new theorems.

Logical foundations

The Agda UALib is based on a minimal version of Martin-Löf dependent type theory (MLTT) that is the same or very close to the type theory on which Martín Escardó’s Type Topology Agda library is based. This is also the type theory that Escardó taught us in a short course on Univalent Foundations of Mathematics with Agda at the Midlands Graduate School in the Foundations of Computing Science at University of Birmingham in 2019.

We won’t go into great detail here because there are already other very nice resources available, such as the section A spartan Martin-Löf type theory of the lecture notes by Martín Escardó just mentioned, as well as the ncatlab entry on Martin-Löf dependent type theory.

We will have much more to say about types and type theory as we progress. For now, suffice it to recall the handfull of objects that are assumed at the jumping-off point for MLTT: “primitive” types (𝟘, 𝟙, and ℕ, denoting the empty type, one-element type, and natural numbers), type formers (+, Π, Σ, Id, denoting binary sum, product, sum, and the identity type), and an infinite collection of universes (types of types) and universe variables to denote them (for which we will use upper-case caligraphic letters like 𝓤, 𝓥, 𝓦, etc., typically from the latter half of the English alphabet).

Intended audience

This document describes UALib in enough detail so that working mathematicians (and possibly some normal people, too) might be able to learn enough about Agda and its libraries to put them to use when creating, formalizing, and verifying new mathematics.

While there are no strict prerequisites, we expect anyone with an interest in this work will have been motivated by prior exposure to universal algebra, as presented in, say, Bergman (2012) or McKenzie, McNulty, Taylor (2018), or category theory, as presented in, say, Riehl (2017) or categorytheory.gitlab.io.

Some prior exposure to type theory and Agda would be helpful, but even without this background one might still be able to get something useful out of this by referring to one or more of the resources mentioned in the references section below to fill in gaps as needed.

Installation

It is assumed that the reader of this documentation is actively experimenting with Agda using Emacs with the agda2-mode extension installed.

If you don’t have Agda and agda2-mode installed, follow the directions on the main Agda website, and/or consult Martín Escardó’s installation instructions or our modified version of Escardó’s instructions.

The main repository for the UAlib is gitlab.com/ualib/ualib.gitlab.io. There are more installation instructions in the README.md file of the UALib repository, but a summary of what’s required is

Instructions for installing each of these are available in the README.md file of the UALib repository.

If you already have git installed, a cloned copy of ualib/ualib.gitlab.io is obtained using one of the following alternative commands:

git clone https://gitlab.com/ualib/ualib.gitlab.io.git


or, if you have a gitlab account with ssh keys configured, you could try

git clone git@gitlab.com:ualib/ualib.gitlab.io.git


These pages are generated from a set of literate Agda (.lagda) files, written in markdown, with the formal, verified, mathematical development appearing within \\begin{code}...\\end{code} blocks, and some mathematical discussions outside those blocks. The html pages are generated automatically by Agda with the command

agda --html --html-highlight=code UALib.lagda


This generates a set of markdown files that are then converted to html by jekyll with the command

bundle exec jekyll build


In practice, we use the script UALib/generate-md, to process the lagda files and put the resulting markdown output in the right place, and then we use the script jekyll-serve to invoke the following commands.

cp UALib/html/UALib.md index.md
cp UALib/html/*.html UALib/html/*.md .
bundle install --path vendor
bundle exec jekyll serve --watch --incremental


This causes jekyll to serve the web pages locally so we can inspect them by pointing a browser to 127.0.0.1:4000.

LaTeX source files may be generated with a combination of agda --latex and pandoc commands. This can only be done one module at a time, but the script generate-tex is set up to process all modules in the library. Typically, after each update of the library, we run the following at the command line from within the UALib subdirectory:

./generate-tex; ./generate-md


This type-checks all the modules, and generates html and latex documentation (in the UALib/html and UALib/latex subdirectories).

Warning! Our .lagda source files make heavy use of unicode characters, both inside and outside code blocks. Therefore, the tex source files produced with the agda --latex command cannot be processed correctly with pdflatex (as far as we know). Instead, we use xelatex along with the unixode package. For examples, look in the subdirectories of the _static/paper directory of the ualib.gitlab.io repository.

XeLaTeX and arXiv. xelatex has the major advantage of correctly processing and formatting unicode characters, but it has the major disadvantage of not being compatible with arXiv, and it seems there are no plans to support xelatex in the near future. However, one can email the arXiv administrators and explain that xelatex is required to process the manuscript and (in my experience, at least) this will prompt a reply with permission to submit a precompiled pdf without the accompanying tex source code.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Siva Somayyajula, who contributed to this project during its first year and helped get it off the ground.

Thanks also to Andreas Abel, Andrej Bauer, Clifford Bergman, Venanzio Capretta, Martín Escardó, Ralph Freese, Bill Lampe, Miklós Maróti, Peter Mayr, JB Nation, and Hyeyoung Shin for helpful discussions, corrections, advice, inspiration and encouragement.

Most of the mathematical results that formalized in the UAlib are already well known.

Regarding the Agda source code in the Agda UALib, this is mainly due to the author with one major caveat: we benefited greatly from, and the library depends upon, the lecture notes on Univalent Foundations and Homotopy Type Theory and the Type Topology Agda Library by Martín Hötzel Escardó. The author is indebted to Martín for making his library and notes available and for teaching a course on type theory in Agda at the Midlands Graduate School in the Foundations of Computing Science in Birmingham in 2019.

References

The following Agda documentation and tutorials helped inform and improve the UAlib, especially the first one in the list.

Finally, the official Agda Wiki, Agda User’s Manual, Agda Language Reference, and the (open source) Agda Standard Library source code are also quite useful.

How to cite the Agda UALib

If you use the Agda UALib or wish to refer to it or its documentation in a publication or on a web page, please use the following BibTeX data:

@article{DeMeo:2021,
author        = {William DeMeo},
title         = {The {A}gda {U}niversal {A}lgebra {L}ibrary and
{B}irkhoff's {T}heorem in {D}ependent {T}ype {T}heory},
journal       = {CoRR},
volume        = {abs/2101.10166},
year          = {2021},
eprint        = {2101.10166},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
primaryClass  = {cs.LO},
url           = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10166},
note          = {source code: \url{https://gitlab.com/ualib/ualib.gitlab.io}}
}