Thanks, John!  Please take my code whenever you like.  I'm done coding, and 
I'll regard my tar.gz file to be final after I fold my miz3 improvement back 
into my paper and finish my Miz3Tips file, which only requires me to understand 
Freek's syntax, and he just made a contribution to that, explaining that miz3 
definitely allow ending a proof with the final semicolon
  end;
`;;
These two matters won't take more than 2 weeks.  Understanding HOL might take 
longer, but that's not needed for you to distribute my code.  Thanks again for 
offering to include my code in your distribution.  The stronger my ties are to 
the HOL community, the better the chances of my math paper is.  The math folks 
and K-12 math ed folks would like to know that the HOL community thinks that 
e.g. teaching real axiomatic geometry with a proof assistant is possible. 

   Generally speaking, I'd say that "the automation is too powerful"
   is a problem we'd love [miz3] to have!

Great!  Right now it's not powerful enough for me.  

   Among other things, this makes MESON relatively inefficient at
   using a logical equivalence |- !x. P[x] <=> Q[x] to "rewrite" P to
   Q inside another formula; the length of the required proof grows
   with the size of that formula, and replacement inside quantifiers
   may expand the search space further because you need to examine
   different instantiations. I think that accounts for your
   time-consuming B4' derivation, for example.

Excellent, and for B4', we can say P = open (A,B) and Q = \X. Between A X B:

let IN_Interval = thm `;
 ! A B X. X IN open (A,B) <=> Between A X B
 by Interval_DEF, IN_ELIM_THM, REWRITE_TAC`;;

Is there any easy fix for this?  Freek noticed that REWRITE_TAC often improved 
speed. I think you're saying that I'm not really having a set theory problem, 
but that set theory often involves |- !x. P[x] <=> Q[x].

   The description of HOL in the Logic manual is based on a formal
   semantics inside set theory, developed by Andy Pitts. 

I see Andy wrote a paper with your advisor The HOL Logic and System but I can't 
find a pdf for it.  Should I read that? 

   While this might be considered the ultimate reference, I'm not sure
   that it's necessarily the easiest place to start, even for a
   mathematician, if you want a satisfying intuitive understanding of
   the logic. 

That's been my experience, but I think my problem is that the stuff I don't 
know is assumed to be already understood.  Math papers of course always have 
this problem.  

   My own (perhaps unhelpful) point of view is that if you think of
   types as nonempty sets, you can pretty much read statements at face
   value with the ordinary mathematical sense of "->" as function
   space etc. 

That's helpful and how I think of it, and I learned it from your tutorial.  But 
I'd like to really understand.  I want to explain this to my math audience, who 
all understand ZFC.  Greenberg e.g. posted very literate math logic in his 
recent Amer Math Monthly survey 
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.4169/000298910X480063
What confuses me is that I understand how a computer can verify FOL proofs, or 
even construct them, so if we use ZFC, we can do modern math on computers.  I 
want to understand the analogous picture with HOL.  And I can't even imagine 
how a computer can do HOL if it's not using axioms with something very much 
like FOL!  It isn't that I like ZFC, and as Rob pointed out, I'd never 
understood the F part, the replacement axiom.  It's just something I was taught 
in math classes.

   I admit that polymorphic type variables slightly spoil this naive picture. 

And I'm using that from sets.ml, and even wrote some of my own:
let union = new_definition
  `! s t:A->bool. s union t = \ x. x IN s \/ x IN t`;;
let union_SUBSET = thm `;
  let s t u be A->bool;
  thus s union t  SUBSET  u  <=>  s SUBSET u /\ t SUBSET u
  by union, SUBSET, IN, BETA_THM`;;

I'm certainly happy with polymorphic Scheme code (map etc)!  And I don't see 
the problem with your naive picture: A is any set. 

   I don't think the correspondence between everyday informal
   mathematics and HOL is any more complicated than that between
   informal mathematics and ZF set theory.

Great, and as Paul Halmos's book Naive Set Theory explains, hardly any 
mathematicians understand how to use ZFC to construct the real numbers and 
prove its basic properties.  So I don't insist on understand HOL any better 
than I already understand ZFC :)

   Yes, that's correct. This proof doesn't look very much like a
   normal axiomatic one: first it proves that cos(angle_sum) = -1

Thanks, and I haven't figured out your proof of this yet.  I do think this is 
obvious for right triangles, because the sine & cosine of the two non-right 
angles are transposed, and that must prove, by your calculus definition of 
angles, that they're complementary.  I just understood something related to 
this that's been bugging me for a while:

Trig is based on the arc-length integral definition of angle measures, but we 
don't actually know that the arc-length integral measures the arc length!  We 
don't have any other definition of arc length besides the integral.  For 
integrals calculating the area under the curve, there's no such problem, 
because the upper and lower sums coincide if the function is integrable, so the 
integral must be the area.  With arc-length integrals, there's no upper and 
lower sum.  So Trig is based on a Calculus formula that we think, but don't 
know, measures arc length.  

But this isn't really a problem, because Greenberg, Moise & Venema's axioms for 
angle measures just requires there be some function mu that satisfies some 
properties, most importantly 
mu(AOB) = mu(AOG) + mu(GOB)
if G is in the interior of angle AOB.
Well, the arc-length integral gives you that!  It doesn't matter if mu(AOB) is 
"really" the length of the arc swept out by angle AOB in a unit circle centered 
at O.  We get the mu additivity from integral manipulations.

I'm still a long way from understanding your proof, but it's a start :)

-- 
Best,
Bill 

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