Three pillars of Math
- Definitions: so you know what you’re talking about, the communicate ideas to others, boundary object. In distributed systems talks especially, disagreements over tech are actually just disguised disagreements over definitions (e.g. on what decentralization means, see also word meaning and semantics)
- Theorems
- Possibility results (e.g. protocols like Raft or Tendermint) articulate assumptions under which solution has desired properties
- Impossibility results (e.g. PSL-FLM and FLP results) tell you to avoid wasting time trying to design something that cannot exist
- Proofs: arguments of why we know these theorems are actually true statements
- Can guide you to what the solution might look like (specifically, in the realm of possibility results)
- Can help you asses whether changes to the solution void the properties it originally had