Abstract

In 2022, Maryna Viazovska was awarded the Fields Medal for an outstanding achievement: solving the sphere packing problem in dimension 8. The ingenuity of Viazovska’s solution stems from her combination of techniques from the apparently unrelated theories of radial Schwartz functions and modular forms to construct a so-called “magic function”, using which one can show that the density of the E₈ sphere packing is an upper-bound for all sphere packings in dimension 8.

Around 18 months ago, I embarked on a venture to really put the capabilities of Lean to test: I began a project to formalise Viazovska’s groundbreaking solution. Never before has work that is both as recent and as highly acclaimed as Viazovska’s been formalised, and if this project succeeds, it will be an important milestone for the formalisation movement.

This talk is based on joint (and ongoing) work by Birkbeck, Hariharan, Ma, Mehta, Lee, Viazovska, and open-source contributors.

=== Hybrid talk ===

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Meeting ID: 898 5609 1954 Passcode: ITPtalk