Proof and Refutations is a book by the philosopher Imre Lakatos expounding his view of the progress of mathematics. The book is written as a series of Socratic dialogues involving a group of students. A central theme is that definitions are not carved in stone, but often have to be patched up in the light of later insights, in particular failed proofs. This gives mathematics a somewhat experimental flavour.

In computer science, proofs and refutations were further developed in the Scientific Community Metaphor by Bill Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt building on the work of Lakatos ^*

References

• Lakatos (1976). Proofs and Refutations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521290384
• William Kornfeld and Carl Hewitt. "The Scientific Community Metaphor" IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, SMC-11. 1981
• Bill Kornfeld. "The Use of Parallelism to Implement a Heuristic Search" IJCAI 1981.
• Bill Kornfeld. "Parallelism in Problem Solving" MIT EECS Doctoral Dissertation, August 1981.
• Bill Kornfeld. "Combinatorially Implosive Algorithms" CACM. 1982.

Logic programming | Science studies | Philosophy of science | Theorem prover languages | Formal methods | Logic in computer science | Theoretical computer science | Mathematics books