Valeria de Paiva writes that she was quoted in a new book by Simone Severini and Andrea Borghini, *Science, Ltd.: Notes on the Research Enterprise in the Age of Machines*, and reflects on the advice she gave in 2023. The central claim is that mathematical knowledge should not be reduced to formal systems alone; instead, the priority is extracting semantic meaning from natural-language texts before formalizing, because natural language is an extraordinarily successful technology that humans have developed over hundreds of thousands of years and is unlikely to be rendered obsolete by proof assistants or language models. She advocates building bridges between informal and formal mathematics through a "Network Mathematics" knowledge graph that connects concepts, theorems, papers, and formal statements across the different ways mathematics exists.
- Her project Network Mathematics aims to represent mathematical knowledge as an extended knowledge graph rather than a pile of documents or a single formal library
- MathGloss attempts to align mathematical concepts across resources written for humans and those intended for machines
- She acknowledges she underestimated the age of natural language, saying "thousands of years" when fully developed human language likely dates back at least 100,000 years
- Her project Network Mathematics aims to represent mathematical knowledge as an extended knowledge graph rather than a pile of documents or a single formal library
- MathGloss attempts to align mathematical concepts across resources written for humans and those intended for machines
- She acknowledges she underestimated the age of natural language, saying "thousands of years" when fully developed human language likely dates back at least 100,000 years
A blog post by Valeria de Paiva reflecting on the past four years of the Topos Institute, highlighting milestones, personal and research experiences, and the institute's mission-driven goals.
Dr Valeria Correa Vaz de Paiva is a Brazilian mathematician, logician, computer scientist, and computational linguist known for introducing the concept of dialectica spaces, which model linear logic in advanced programming languages. She has contributed significantly to natural language processing (NLP) and works at the Topos Institute in Berkeley, California. De Paiva is committed to encouraging more women into STEM fields and is actively involved in Women In Logic (WIL).
