Edward Ayers
Research Engineer at Cogna
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolEdward Ayers is a research engineer and former founder with 11 years’ experience applying formal methods and AI across industry and academia. With a PhD in Mathematics from Cambridge, he has driven automated theorem proving and Lean 4 development—contributing tactics, language-server improvements, and documentation to prominent open-source projects like lean4 and mathlib4. His background spans postdoctoral research at CMU, AI research in computer vision, and early-stage product work at his startup HitSave, giving him a rare blend of deep theoretical rigor and practical engineering. Based in Cambridge, he combines theorem-proving expertise with production-focused backend development and a knack for refactoring complex codebases to improve developer tooling.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mathematics, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mathematics at University of Cambridge
Github Skills (11)
slim10
metaprogramming10
functional-programming10
develop10
t410
leanback10
tactics10
programming-language9
language-design9
monad-transformers9
ls8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
leanprover-community/mathlib4
Mar 2022 - Aug 2022
The math library of Lean 4
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:26 reviews, 35 commits, 17 PRs in 5 months
Contributions summary:Edward primarily contributed to the `mathlib4` repository, focusing on enhancements to the mathematical library. Their work includes the implementation of tactics like `restate_axiom`, `memoFix`, `eapply`, and `fapply`, and modifying list manipulation functions. Additionally, the user has updated dependencies and made code adjustments.
maththeorem-provingcomputer-algebra-systemmathematicsin-progress
leanprover/lean4
Mar 2022 - Nov 2022
Lean 4 programming language and theorem prover
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:76 reviews, 118 commits, 52 PRs in 8 months
Contributions summary:Edward primarily contributed to the development of the Lean 4 programming language and theorem prover by implementing a configuration option for the `apply` tactic to control how new metavariables are handled. They also made several style improvements and applied review requests to the `Apply.lean` file. Furthermore, the user added documentation, including explaining `MonadControl`. They also made improvements to the underlying code used by the language server, including refactoring and code action features.
dependent-typeshomotopy-type-theoryprovertheoremtheorem-prover
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.