UEA’s grant and funding success – September 2025

Scalable theorem proving via mathematical databases

Project lead: Dr Chris Birkbeck

Partners: David Roe (MIT) and Andrew Sutherland (MIT)

Dr Chris Birkbeck (Lecturer in the School of Engineering, Mathematics and Physics) has been awarded $362,000 through the AI for Math Fund - an initiative by Renaissance Philanthropy, with funding support from XTX Markets.

This is part of a joint project with David Roe and Andrew Sutherland from MIT.

The project seeks to increase the scale of mathematical content accessible to automated theorem provers, by creating an interface between the Lean mathematical library (mathlib) and the L-functions and Modular Forms Database (LMFDB).

By connecting mathlib's collection of approximately 100,000 mathematical results with the LMFDB's repository of more than a billion concrete statements, they aim to expand the capabilities of both human mathematicians and AI agents.