Speaking of Proofs

Madhu Sudan (Harvard)

I will briefly introduce my recent works attempting to mimic aspects of human communication, especially the ability to leverage large context to compress communication, even if the context is not shared perfectly by the communicating players. I will then turn to some challenges/open directions in the task of understanding the use of context ("high school math") to compress proofs as we write them in our papers, and in particular on the challenges of coping with uncertainty in this context.