Some other answers have alluded to this, but just to spell it out explicitly: The Curry-Howard isomorphism, in one of its simpler forms, says that objects of the free cartesian closed category CCC[S] on a set S of objects correspond to statements of the multiplicative fragment of intuitionistic logic (things we can build from /\ and ⇒) with free variables from S, and there is at least one morphism P → Q in CCC[S] iff P ⇒ Q is a theorem. Thus we can regard a morphism P → Q as a "proof" of P ⇒ Q. There may be several morphisms from P to Q; for instance if A ∈ S and P = A × A, Q = A, then there are exactly two morphisms from P to Q (projection to the first or second factor), which we can regard as two different proofs of the theorem (A /\ A) ⇒ A.
Reid Barton
- 25.2k
- 1
- 76
- 133