[FOM] What is a proof?

[Tjark Weber]

On Fri, 2009-01-23 at 15:23 -0500, Alasdair Urquhart wrote:
> The authors sum up their main thesis as follows:
> 
>  	We believe that, in the end, it is
>  	a social process that determines whether mathematicians
>  	feel confident about a theorem--and we believe that,
>  	because no comparable social process can take place
>  	among program verifiers, program verification is bound
>  	to fail.

Of course now, more than 30 years later, program verification is still
around (and arguably more successful than ever).

To be fair, the authors raise some issues that are still valid today.
But they seem to have been carried away in their conclusions.

Regards,
Tjark