Termination is an important property of programs, and is notably required for programs formulated in proof assistants. It is a very active subject of research in the Turing-complete formalism of term rewriting. Over the years, many methods and tools have been developed to address the problem of deciding termination for specific problems (since it is undecidable in general). Ensuring the reliability of those tools is therefore an important issue.

In this paper we present a library formalising important results of the theory of well-founded (rewrite) relations in the proof assistant Coq. We also present its application to the automated verification of termination certificates, as produced by termination tools.

The sources are freely available at http://color.inria.fr/.

Bloom and Ésik's concept of iteration theory summarises all equational properties that iteration has in common applications, for example, in domain theory, where to every system of recursive equations, the least solution is assigned. This paper shows that in the coalgebraic approach to iteration, the more appropriate concept is that of a functorial iteration theory (called Elgot theory). These theories have a particularly simple axiomatisation, and all well-known examples of iteration theories are functorial. Elgot theories are proved to be monadic over the category of sets in context (or, more generally, the category of finitary endofunctors of a locally finitely presentable category). This demonstrates that functoriality is an equational property from the perspective of sets in context. In contrast, Bloom and Ésik worked in the base category of signatures rather than sets in context, and there iteration theories are monadic but Elgot theories are not. This explains why functoriality was not included in the definition of iteration theories.

Interactive theorem provers based on dependent type theory have the flexibility to support both constructive and classical reasoning. Constructive reasoning is supported natively by dependent type theory, and classical reasoning is typically supported by adding additional non-constructive axioms. However, there is another perspective that views constructive logic as an extension of classical logic. This paper will illustrate how classical reasoning can be supported in a practical manner inside dependent type theory without additional axioms. We will show several examples of how classical results can be applied to constructive mathematics. Finally, we will show how to extend this perspective from logic to mathematics by representing classical function spaces using a weak value monad.

We prove that the iterative construction of initial algebras converges for endofunctors F of many-sorted sets whenever F has an initial algebra. In the case of one-sorted sets, the convergence takes n steps where n is either an infinite regular cardinal or is at most 3. Dually, the existence of a many-sorted terminal coalgebra implies that the iterative construction of a terminal coalgebra converges. Moreover, every endofunctor with a fixed-point pair larger than the number of sorts is proved to have a terminal coalgebra. As demonstrated by James Worell, the number of steps here need not be a cardinal even in the case of a single sort: it is ω + ω for the finite power-set functor. The above results do not hold for related categories, such as graphs: we present non-constructive initial algebras and terminal coalgebras.

Over recent decades there has been a trend towards formalised mathematics, and a number of sophisticated systems have been developed both to support the formalisation process and to verify the results mechanically. However, each tool is based on a specific foundation of mathematics, and formalisations in different systems are not necessarily compatible. Therefore, the integration of these foundations has received growing interest. We contribute to this goal by using LF as a foundational framework in which the mathematical foundations themselves can be formalised and therefore also the relations between them. We represent three of the most important foundations – Isabelle/HOL, Mizar and ZFC set theory – as well as relations between them. The relations are formalised in such a way that the framework permits the extraction of translation functions, which are guaranteed to be well defined and sound. Our work provides the starting point for a systematic study of formalised foundations in order to compare, relate and integrate them.

We present a programme of research for pluralist formalisations, that is, formalisations that involve proving results in more than one foundation.

A foundation consists of two parts: a logical part, which provides a notion of inference, and a non-logical part, which provides the entities to be reasoned about. An LTT is a formal system composed of two such separate parts. We show how LTTs may be used as the basis for a pluralist formalisation.

We show how different foundations may be formalised as LTTs, and also describe a new method for proof reuse. If we know that a translation Φ exists between two logic-enriched type theories (LTTs) S and T, and we have formalised a proof of a theorem α in S, we may wish to make use of the fact that Φ(α) is a theorem of T. We show how this is sometimes possible by writing a proof script MΦ. For any proof script Mα that proves a theorem α in S, if we change Mα so it first imports MΦ, the resulting proof script will still parse, and will be a proof of Φ(α) in T.

In this paper, we focus on the logical part of an LTT-framework and show how the above method of proof reuse is done for four cases of Φ: inclusion, the double negation translation, the A-translation and the Russell–Prawitz modality. This work has been carried out using the proof assistant Plastic.