As part of the EPSRC Taught Course Centre I am giving a course on formalising mathematics. This is a course for mathematics PhD students enrolled at Imperial College London, Bristol, Bath, Oxford, or Warwick. No formalisation experience will be assumed. Details of the course are available at the second link above. I have been timetabled eight 2-hour lectures on Thursdays 4-6pm UK time, starting this coming Thursday, 21st Jan 2021.

My instinct in the first lecture would be to start by listing a bunch of reasons why learning how to formalise pure mathematics is interesting/useful/important/whatever, and perhaps also explaining how I got involved with it. But I could probably spend about 30 minutes on this, and I don’t want to waste valuable lecture time on it. In fact I won’t actually be giving lectures at all — the 2-hour slots will be mini Lean workshops, where beginners formalise mathematics they know, with me watching, and I cannot see the point of making the students listen to me waffle on about my opinions/history when, after all, they have chosen to come to the course anyway. So I’ve just decided to write the introduction here, and then students can choose to read it at their leisure (or not read it at all)…

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