Salvatore Mercuri
Chapman-Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Mathematics, Imperial College London
Email: salvatore.mercuri (at) imperial.ac.uk
I am currently a Chapman-Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London.
My research focuses on automated theorem proving and formal proof verification (in Lean 4). In particular, I am interested in the application of AI to large-scale research-level formalisation projects including the ongoing project to formalise Fermat's Last Theorem in Lean. I am also a member of the AlphaProof team at Google DeepMind, which is an AI system that saw success at the International Mathematical Olympiad 2024. Since then, we have released Formal Conjectures: a repository of open research level problems in mathematics formalised in Lean 4.
Department of Mathematics, Durham University
Advisor: Thanasis Bouganis
Thesis: The arithmetic of metaplectic modular forms
Imperial College London
Advisor: Kevin Buzzard
University of Edinburgh
Lean is a theorem prover and formal programming language that has grown rapidly as a tool for research in mathematics. Mathlib is an open-source library for Lean containing a large and growing body of mathematical theory in Lean.
The Natural Number Game is a good place to get started. After this, install Lean and follow Imperial College London's "Formalising Mathematics 2025" course on GitHub, as well as reading Mathematics in Lean.
My paper Formalising the local compactness of the adele ring and GitHub repository detail the first formal proof that the adele ring of a number field is locally compact.
The images below and on the home page were made using the C library Arb, which is now part of FLINT (Fast Library for Number Theory). They show the complex plots of modular forms such as the Dedekind eta function. The images use colour to plot the phase of the output complex number of the function for each complex input, being forgetful of magnitude.
FLINT has been used for computational research purposes such as the highest-known (as of January 2024) verification of the Riemann Hypothesis, Dave Platt & Tim Trudgian (2020).