{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/chain-bounding-and-the-leanest-proof-of-zorn","title":"Chain Bounding, the leanest proof of Zorn's lemma, and an illustration of computerized proof formalization","arxiv_id":"2404.11638","date":"2024-04-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Guillermo L. Incatasciato","Pedro Sánchez Terraf"],"abstract":"We present an exposition of the *Chain Bounding Lemma*, which is a common generalization of both Zorn's Lemma and the Bourbaki-Witt fixed point theorem. The proofs of these results through the use of Chain Bounding are amongst the simplest ones that we are aware of. As a by-product, we show that for every poset $P$ and function $f$ from the powerset of $P$ into $P$, there exists a maximal well-ordered chain whose family of initial segments is appropriately closed under $f$. We also provide an introduction to the process of \"computer formalization\" of mathematical proofs by using *proofs assistants*. As an illustration, we verify our main results with the Lean proof assistant.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11638v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11638v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"chain-bounding-and-the-leanest-proof-of-zorn","repo_url":"https://github.com/sterraf/chainbounding","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}