Kevin Hartnett at the Harvard Science Center

RSVP is required for this event.

Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, and the Harvard Library welcome Kevin Hartnett—math and technology writer whose work has been published widely in outlets including Quanta Magazine, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, WIRED, Nautilus, and Scientific American—for a discussion of his new book, The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine Is Transforming Math and AI. The presentation will take place in Hall B of the Harvard Science Center, located at 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge.

Ticketing

RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a copy of The Proof in the Code and pick it up at the event. Following the presentation will be a book signing.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

About The Proof in the Code

The inside story of Lean, a computer program that answers the age-old question: How do you know if something is true?

It began as an obscure bug-checking program at Microsoft Research developed by a lone computer engineer named Leo de Moura. Then an unlikely crew of mathematical misfits caught wind of it and began to adopt it with messianic zeal. Their goal was to create a truth machine that could provide the rarest of all commodities in life: a complete, 100 percent guarantee that something is true. Its name: Lean.

As the movement grew and strengthened the program’s capabilities, it drew in two of the world’s most prominent mathematicians: Peter Scholze and Terence Tao. Google DeepMind, Meta AI, and other tech firms started using the program to supercharge computer reasoning. Now it’s remaking the multi-thousand-year history of how mathematicians work, collaborate, and assess truth, while charting a new path in the march toward machine intelligence.

In The Proof in the Code, Kevin Hartnett tells the definitive story of the birth and rise of Lean, and how a growing movement is transforming the enterprise of mathematics and ushering in a new era of human–computer collaboration. An engrossing, character-driven narrative filled with insights about the future of math, computers, and AI, this brilliant work of journalism from one of the world’s leading math writers offers a profound answer to the question: Can computers reveal universal truths?

Bio

Kevin Hartnett is a math and technology writer whose work has been published widely in outlets including Quanta Magazine, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, WIRED, Nautilus, and Scientific American. He was previously the senior writer at Quanta Magazine covering mathematics and computer science. His work has been collected in multiple volumes of the Best Writing on Mathematics series from Princeton University Press. From 2013 to 2016 he wrote “Brainiac,” a weekly column for The Boston Globe’s Ideas section. He lives in Yarmouth, Maine. Photo Credit: Katie English

Harvard Science Book Talks

The Harvard Science Book Talks series is a collaboration between the Harvard University Division of Science, the Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store. The series features talks by the authors of recently published books on a variety of science-related topics and is open to both the Harvard community and to the general public. Learn more and watch recordings of past talks here.