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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.


Employment

Chapman-Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow at Imperial College London
2025 - Present

Research Scientist at Google DeepMind (via Adecco)
2024 - Present

Knowledge Transfer Associate at the University of Edinburgh and IDEMS International
2023 - 2025

Research Data Scientist at NatWest Group
2021 - 2023

Mathematical Researcher at ThinkTank Maths
2020 - 2021

Education

PhD in Mathematics
2015 - 2019

Department of Mathematics, Durham University
Advisor: Thanasis Bouganis

Thesis: The arithmetic of metaplectic modular forms


MSc. in Pure Mathematics
2014 - 2015

Imperial College London
Advisor: Kevin Buzzard


BSc. in Mathematics
2010 - 2014

University of Edinburgh


Publications

  1. Formalising the local compactness of the adele ring, Annals of Formalized Mathematics 1 (2025), 133-159.
  2. (with D. Batra, R. Khraishi) Conformal Predictions for Longitudinal Data, preprint (2023).
  3. (with G. Cowan, R. Khraishi) Modelling customer lifetime value in the retail banking industry, preprint (2023).
  4. (with R. Khraishi, R. Okhrati, D. Batra, C. Hamill, T. Ghasempour, A. Nowlan) An Introduction to Machine Unlearning, (2022).
  5. Algebraicity of metaplectic L-functions, (arXiv link), J. Number Theory 219 (2021), 109-161.
  6. (with T. Bouganis) On the Rankin–Selberg method for vector-valued Siegel modular forms, (arXiv link), Int. J. Number Theory 17 (2020), no. 5, 1207-1242.
  7. p-adic L-functions on metaplectic groups (arXiv link), J. London Math. Soc., 102 (2020), 229-256.
  8. The p-adic L-function for half-integral weight modular forms, manuscripta math., 161 (2020), 61-91.

Talks


Conferences and workshops attended


Resources

Lean

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.


FLINT

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).