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The Proof in the Code

How a Truth Machine Is Transforming Math and AI

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Pub Date Jun 09 2026 | Archive Date Jul 09 2026

Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Quanta Books


Description

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?

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 Note From the Publisher

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.

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...


Advance Praise

"The Proof in the Code is a rare achievement: a deeply informed account of modern mathematics and computer science that is also genuinely exciting to read. Kevin Hartnett transforms work in a famously dense domain into a lucid and compelling narrative about how we decide what to trust, in both machines and ourselves. This is science writing at its best: technically precise, conceptually ambitious, and consistently accessible." —Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus

The Proof in the Code is about the people building a new way of creating mathematics, their ambitions, their uncertainties, their false starts and long leaps. Highly recommended.” —Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong 

"Kevin Hartnett is one of today's finest chroniclers of math. With marvelous clarity and narrative flair, he introduces us to the computer-verified proof, the drama behind it, and the people reimagining what math can be." —Steven Strogatz, acclaimed Cornell mathematician, New York Times bestselling author of Infinite Powers, and co-host of The Joy of Why podcast

"Lean is one of the most important things happening to math right now—future generations may come to regard it as the Euclid’s Elements of our time. In The Proof in the Code, Kevin Hartnett perfectly captures the unlikely story of Lean’s birth and development." —Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown

"I loved this weird and wonderful book! You don’t need to like math—or understand code—to grasp why this story matters. The Proof in the Code, written by the one person with the perspective to connect mathematicians, engineers, and the rise of AI, reveals why a technical idea hiding in plain sight could determine whether the machines we build will ever deserve our complete trust." —Amy Webb, author of The Big Nine 

"The Proof in the Code is a rare achievement: a deeply informed account of modern mathematics and computer science that is also genuinely exciting to read. Kevin Hartnett transforms work in a...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780374620059
PRICE $30.00 (USD)
PAGES 288

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