Few constructions in mathematics are as elusive as the homotopy groups of spheres. These groups, which intuitively measure n-dimensional loops on m-dimensional spheres, appear at first glance to be almost completely random - an unfortunate fact, seeing as they constitute one of the fundamental building blocks of algebraic topology and homotopy theory. However, the situation is not completely hopeless: in 1951, Serre proved his celebrated finiteness theorem, which says that these groups are almost always finite abelian groups, except in two classes of special cases when they also contain copies of the integers. In a recent paper, Barton and Campion proved a variation of this result in homotopy type theory (HoTT) - an extension of Martin-Löf type theory, particularly suitable for reasoning about and formalising algebraic topology and homotopy theory. Their result shows that the homotopy groups of spheres are all finitely presented - and constructively so. Prior to this proof, only low-dimensional homotopy groups of spheres had been computed in HoTT. This made it a major breakthrough for HoTT as a foundation and, as such, the immediate target of a full-scale formalisation project. In this paper, we present the outcome of this project: a complete formalisation of Barton and Campion’s proof of the Serre finiteness theorem in Cubical Agda, a constructive proof assistant implementing a cubical flavour of HoTT. In the light of the constructivity of Cubical Agda, we discuss the prospect of running the algorithm provided by our formalisation in order to compute concrete homotopy groups of spheres.

Abstract We present a cubical type theory based on the Cartesian cube category (faces, degeneracies, symmetries, diagonals, but no connections or reversal) with univalent universes, each containing Π, Σ, path, identity, natural number, boolean, suspension, and glue (equivalence extension) types. The type theory includes a syntactic description of a uniform Kan operation, along with judgmental equality rules defining the Kan operation on each type. The Kan operation uses both a different set of generating trivial cofibrations and a different set of generating cofibrations than the Cohen, Coquand, Huber, and Mörtberg (CCHM) model. Next, we describe a constructive model of this type theory in Cartesian cubical sets. We give a mechanized proof, using Agda as the internal language of cubical sets in the style introduced by Orton and Pitts, that glue, Π, Σ, path, identity, boolean, natural number, suspension types, and the universe itself are Kan in this model, and that the universe is univalent. An advantage of this formal approach is that our construction can also be interpreted in a range of other models, including cubical sets on the connections cube category and the De Morgan cube category, as used in the CCHM model, and bicubical sets, as used in directed type theory.

Homotopy theory can be developed synthetically in homotopy type theory, using types to describe spaces, the identity type to describe paths in a space, and iterated identity types to describe higher-dimensional paths. While some aspects of homotopy theory have been developed synthetically and formalized in proof assistants, some seemingly easy examples have proved difficult because the required manipulations of paths becomes complicated. In this paper, we describe a cubical approach to developing homotopy theory within type theory. The identity type is complemented with higher-dimensional cube types, such as a type of squares, dependent on four points and four lines, and a type of three-dimensional cubes, dependent on the boundary of a cube. Path-over-a-path types and higher generalizations are used to describe cubes in a fibration over a cube in the base. These higher-dimensional cube and path-over types can be defined from the usual identity type, but isolating them as independent conceptual abstractions has allowed for the formalization of some previously difficult examples.