Philosophy Enters the Optics Laboratory: Bell's Theorem and its First Experimental Tests (1965-1982)

This paper deals with the ways that the issue of completing quantum mechanics was brought into laboratories and became a topic in mainstream quantum optics. It focuses on the period between 1965, when Bell published what now we call Bell's theorem, and 1982, when Aspect published the results of his experiments. I argue that what was considered good physics after Aspect's experiments was once considered by many a philosophical matter instead of a scientific one, and that the path from philosophy to physics required a change in the physics community's attitude about the status of the foundations of quantum mechanics.Comment: 57 pages, accepted by Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physic

Automated deduction with built-in theories: completeness results and constraint solving techniques

Postprint (published version

Washington University Record, December 3, 1992

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/1602/thumbnail.jp

A Survey of Symbolic Methods in Computational Analysis of Cryptographic Systems

Since the 1980s, two approaches have been developed for analyzing security protocols. One of the approaches relies on a computational model that considers issues of complexity and probability. This approach captures a strong notion of security, guaranteed against all probabilistic polynomial-time attacks. The other approach relies on a symbolic model of protocol executions in which cryptographic primitives are treated as black boxes. Since the seminal work of Dolev and Yao, it has been realized that this latter approach enables significantly simpler and often automated proofs. However, the guarantees that it offers have been quite unclear. For more than twenty years the two approaches have coexisted but evolved mostly independently. Recently, significant research efforts attempt to develop paradigms for cryptographic systems analysis that combines the best of both worlds. There are two broad directions that have been followed. {\em Computational soundness} aims to establish sufficient conditions under which results obtained using symbolic models imply security under computational models. The {\em direct approach} aims to apply the principles and the techniques developed in the context of symbolic models directly to computational ones. In this paper we survey existing results along both of these directions. Our goal is to provide a rather complete summary that could act as a quick reference for researchers who want to contribute to the field, want to make use of existing results, or just want to get a better picture of what results already exist

Wave Equation Numerical Resolution: a Comprehensive Mechanized Proof of a C Program

We formally prove correct a C program that implements a numerical scheme for the resolution of the one-dimensional acoustic wave equation. Such an implementation introduces errors at several levels: the numerical scheme introduces method errors, and floating-point computations lead to round-off errors. We annotate this C program to specify both method error and round-off error. We use Frama-C to generate theorems that guarantee the soundness of the code. We discharge these theorems using SMT solvers, Gappa, and Coq. This involves a large Coq development to prove the adequacy of the C program to the numerical scheme and to bound errors. To our knowledge, this is the first time such a numerical analysis program is fully machine-checked.Comment: No. RR-7826 (2011

Equational logic and rewriting

International audienceIn this survey, we do not address higher order logics nor type theory, but rather restrict to first-order concepts. We focus on equational logic and its relation to rewriting logic and we consider their impact on automated deduction and programming languages