History

ITP 2018 is the ninth conference on Interactive Theorem Proving and related topics, ranging from theoretical foundations to implementation aspects and applications in program verification, security, and formalization of mathematics. The inaugural meeting of ITP was held on 11 to 14 July 2010 in Edinburgh, Scotland, as part of the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC, 9 to 21 July 2010). ITP is the evolution of the TPHOLs conference series to the broad field of interactive theorem proving. TPHOLs meetings took place every year from 1988 until 2009.

The TPHOLs Conference Series

TPHOLs 2009 was the twenty-second in a series of international conferences on the applications of higher order logic theorem proving. The first three (two at Cambridge and one at Århus) were informal users’ meetings for the HOL system and were the only ones without published papers. Between 1991 and 1995 (Davis, Leuven, Vancouver, Malta, Utah) the conference entertained an increasingly wide field of interest.

The evolution resulted in the program committee for the meeting in Turku (1996) deeming that the scope of the conference included all reasoning tools for higher order logics and adopted the name TPHOLs, an acronym for Theorem Proving in Higher Order Logics. (The final letter was considered necessary to break the direct connection between the conference and the HOL system.) This decision was strongly endorsed at the business sessions at Turku and Murray Hill (1997).

An extensive collection of links to various aspects of previous conferences in the series may be found below.

Associated Communities

An inspection of the proceedings of recent conferences show that the conference accommodates the user communities of a number of interactive theorem proving systems. The interested reader is referred to the web sites for the following provers:

Abella ⋅ ACL2 ⋅ Agda ⋅ Beluga ⋅ Coq ⋅ HOL ⋅ IMPS ⋅ Isabelle ⋅ Lean ⋅ LEGO ⋅ Matita ⋅ Mizar ⋅ Nuprl ⋅ ProofPower ⋅ PVS ⋅ TLA⁺ Proof System

Traditions

A longstanding convention is that the annual conference should be held in a continent different to the location of the previous meeting. Another tradition is that the organizers for each meeting handle all aspects of the conference for the whole year in consultation with the previous few organizers. This includes selection of the programme committee, editing the proceedings, fund-raising, program, and local arrangements. Another responsibility of the organizers in year n is to call for bids and conduct a poll for the selection of the venue for the conference in year n + 1.

Past ITP and TPHOLs Conferences