Implementation of Bourbaki’s Elements of Mathematics in Coq: Part Two, From Natural Numbers to Real Numbers JOSÉ GRIMM Inria Sophia-Antipolis, Marelle Team Email:
[email protected] This paper describes a formalization of the rst book of the series Elements of Mathematics by Nicolas Bourbaki, using the Coq proof assistant. In a rst paper published in this journal, we presented the axioms and basic constructions (corresponding to a part of the rst two chapters of book I, Theory of sets). We discuss here the set of integers (third chapter of book I, theory of set), the sets Z and Q (rst chapter of book II, Algebra) and the set of real numbers (Chapter 4 of book III, General topology). We start with a comparison of the Bourbaki approach, the Coq standard library, and the Ssreect library, then present our implementation. 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 The Number Sets This paper is the second in a series that explains our work on a project (named Gaia), whose aim is to formalize, on a computer, the fundamental notions of math- ematics. We have chosen the “Elements of Mathematics” of Bourbaki as our guide- line, the Coq proof assistant as tool, and ssreflect as proof language. As ex- plained in the first paper [Gri10], our implementation relies on the theory of sets, rather than a theory of types. In this paper we focus on the construction of some sets of numbers. Starting with the set of integers N (which is an additive monoid), one can define Z as its group of differences (this is a ring), then Q as its field of fractions (this is naturally a topological space), then R, the topological completion (that happens to be an Archimedean field); next comes the algebraic closure C of R.