Back in the summer of 2012, emboldened by how nicely the calculation π₁(S¹) had gone, I asked a summer research intern, Joseph Lee, to work on formalizing a proof that the higher-inductive definition of the torus (see Section 6.6 of the HoTT book) is equivalent to a product of two circles. This seemed to me like it should be a simple exercise: define the functions back and forth by recursion, and then prove that they’re mutually inverse by induction. Joseph and I managed to define the two functions, but after spending a while staring at pages-long path algebra goals in both Agda and Coq, we eventually threw in the towel on proving that they were mutually inverse. By the end of the IAS year, both Kristina Sojakova and Peter Lumsdaine had given proof sketches, and Kristina’s later appeared as a 25-page proof in the exercise solutions of the book. But it still bothered me that we didn’t have a simple proof of what seemed like it should be a simple theorem…

Since the Bezem, Coquand, and Huber cubical sets model of HoTT was developed, Guillaume Brunerie and I have been thinking about cubical type theories based on these ideas (more on that in some other post). As part of this, we have also played with using cubical ideas in “book HoTT” (MLTT with axioms for univalence and HITs) in Agda. The main ingredient is to make use of more general “cube types” than just the identity type (the special case of lines). Each cube type is dependent on the boundary of a cube, and represents the “inside” of the boundary. For example, we have a type of squares, dependent on four points and four paths that make up the boundary of a square. And a type of cubes, dependent on the eight points, twelve lines, and six squares that make up the boundary of a cube (implicit arguments are crucial here: everything but the squares can be implicit). Another ingredient is to use path-over-a-path and higher cube-over-a-cube types to represent paths in fibrations.

Now, these cube types are not really “new”, in the sense that they can be defined in terms of higher identity types. For example, a square can be represented by a disc between composites, and a path-over can be reduced to homogeneous paths using transport. However, isolating these cubes and cube-overs as abstractions, and developing some facts about them, has allowed for the formalization of some new examples. Guillaume used this approach to prove the 3×3 lemma about pushouts that is used in the calculation of the Hopf fibration. I used it to resolve a question about the contractibility of a patch theory. Evan Cavallo used it in the proof of the Mayer-Vietoris theorem.

And, we finally have a simple write-the-maps-back-and-forth-and-then-induct-and-beta-reduce proof that the torus is a product of two circles.

You can read about it here:

A Cubical Approach to Synthetic Homotopy Theory

Daniel R. Licata and Guillaume Brunerie

Homotopy theory can be developed synthetically in homotopy type theory, using types to describe spaces, the identity type to describe paths in a space, and iterated identity types to describe higher-dimensional paths. While some aspects of homotopy theory have been developed synthetically and formalized in proof assistants, some seemingly straightforward examples have proved difficult because the required manipulations of paths becomes complicated. In this paper, we describe a cubical approach to developing homotopy theory within type theory. The identity type is complemented with higher-dimensional cube types, such as a type of squares, dependent on four points and four lines, and a type of three-dimensional cubes, dependent on the boundary of a cube. Path-over-a-path types and higher generalizations are used to describe cubes in a fibration over a cube in the base. These higher-dimensional cube and path-over types can be defined from the usual identity type, but isolating them as independent conceptual abstractions has allowed for the formalization of some previously difficult examples.

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