ProofFlow: Flow Diagrams for Proofs

TL;DR

ProofFlow introduces a formalism and tool for transforming proofs into flow diagrams to enhance their understanding, aiming to create an online repository and enable semantic analysis of mathematical proofs.

Contribution

It presents a novel formalism and software system for converting proofs into flow diagrams, facilitating better comprehension and data mining of mathematical literature.

Findings

Developed a formal language for proof diagrams

Created software for transforming proofs into flowcharts

Planned an online repository of proof diagrams

Abstract

We present a light formalism for proofs that encodes their inferential structure, along with a system that transforms these representations into flow-chart diagrams. Such diagrams should improve the comprehensibility of proofs. We discuss language syntax, diagram semantics, and our goal of building a repository of diagrammatic representations of proofs from canonical mathematical literature. The repository will be available online in the form of a wiki at proofflow.org, where the flow chart drawing software will be deployable through the wiki editor. We also consider the possibility of a semantic tagging of the assertions in a proof, to permit data mining.