The operator caught what no check had ever tested: nobody had LOOKED at
the rendered pages. A ten-inspector visual audit of all 129 pages (every
page opened as an image) found 40 defects, including didactic
correctness bugs invisible to the text layer:
BAD, fixed:
- ch03 printed WRONG Lean operators: \lean{P /\ Q} lost its backslash
('P / Q') and \lean{P \/ Q} lost the operator entirely ('P Q') —
TeX ate them inside the non-verbatim macro. Now the unicode ∧/∨ the
book uses everywhere else.
- ch12: the doubling display overflowed its box border, slicing the
math; stacked on two lines.
- toolkit Card 6: the headroom-audit display was clipped by the page
edge; now an align* stack.
UGLY, fixed:
- title page: the 'pyramid motif' at 5% white opacity on near-black
rendered as smudge artifacts, plus a clipped ∀ glyph in the corner
— redrawn with solid mixed colors (no transparency), glyph removed;
the footer's mid-word paragraph gap was a \vspace landing inside
horizontal mode; fixed with \par
- ch06: both clock diagrams' wrap-around arrows ran counterclockwise,
retracing over earlier arcs — target position expressed as 12 (one
revolution) so the arc continues clockwise, landing on 0 (mod 12)
and 1 (mod 11) correctly
- ch04: two_mul'' printed as two_mul" (quote ligature)
- one-line orphaned box fragments and stranded solution headings
throughout: bigidea/tryit/pitfall/aha/checkpoint are now unbreakable
(none exceeds half a page), worked boxes announce '(continued)' after
a break, \solhead keeps four lines with \Needspace
- --all/--receipt flags printed as one merged dash: \ddash macro
- inline code no longer hyphen-breaks at underscores (codeguards)
- ch09's 2^{...} smudge, glossary margin overflow, ch08 orphaned
listing line, ch13 command-line layout, three >10pt overfulls
THE STRUCTURAL LESSON, encoded: the two worst clipping bugs had been
announced as 80pt/73pt overfull warnings in every build log and ignored.
check-book.sh now FAILS on any overfull box past 10pt — the machine was
telling us; now it is allowed to stop us.
132 pages; publication-history and README counts synced; every fixed
page re-rendered and verified by eye. Button: ALL GREEN (96 checks).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The current-edition line (fourteen chapters, 129 pages, published
2026-08-08) is now a live claim: check-book.sh verifies its chapter and
page counts against the built book AND verifies the COMMITTED main.pdf
carries the line — so the PDF a GitHub visitor downloads can no longer
silently lag the sources. Historical lines are exempt from the whole-book
claim scans (BEGIN/END PUBHIST markers).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
New Chapter 13, 'The Second Summit: A Hash-Based Pyramid' — SLH-DSA
(FIPS 205) as the transfer experiment for the whole method:
- opens on leaf 18 as the anomaly; correctness-vs-security across the
quantum divide ('a correct implementation of a broken lock is still a
broken lock')
- Lamport -> Winternitz chains with the checksum see-saw run twice on
real w=16 numbers, including a concrete failed forgery (480 -> 479,
digit 14 -> 13)
- FORS worked at napkin scale (k=2, a=2, one reuse = one forgery) and
real scale (28 of 57,344, exponent 14)
- the virtual hypertree: digest split 21/7/2 to the bit, the 54-bit
meter peeled 9 bits per layer, verification priced exactly (254 fixed
oracle calls; the see-saw itself caps a layer at 510, so worst case
3,824 — the naive 525*35 bound is unreachable, and the chapter says
why); ~2^72 to build vs ~2^12 to check
- the eleven certificates, the loop-to-fold bridges, the honest
'visible, not correct' boundary (no second semantics — and why the
natural move fails), the cone-growth table, the t_l/t_len naming
inversion told as the war story it was, the apex as an audit
invitation with the verbatim theorem named
- 'The leaf, live': leaf-vs-head precision ('plausible, and wrong
twice'), the three-clause self-reference ledger (attested machinery /
attested scheme / honest gap), one-command tryit
- six exercises with pathway'd solutions; checkpoint hands the
who-checks-them question to the finale
Structural: attestation renamed ch14 and now carries the book's single
ending (where-to-go, further reading, final reframe, prospective
checkpoint — moved from ch12); its two interior checkpoints demoted to
bigidea/tryit so the terminal checkpoint stands alone; opening now
receives ch13's baton. ch12 ends as a chapter. Front matter: three-summit
arc, fourteen-week plan, honest discussion-exercise count; ch01 promise
ladder extended to Chapters 13/14; glossary +5 entries (and the
pre-existing Hasse-bound misordering fixed); README fourteen chapters +
build.sh recipe.
Every constant verified against fips205-slhdsa-verified and
lean-transparency-log by four adversarial checkers; arithmetic
independently recomputed; didactic panel scored the chapter 9/8 —
the book's high-water mark. Build: 128 pages, zero unresolved refs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Per the 7-reader didactic panel and BOOK-OVERHAUL-PLAN.md:
- front matter: box legend demoted below a lived example (the aha box
becomes its own legend entry)
- ch04: open on the stake (proof the size of a compiler), new section
'When you get stuck --- and you will' promoting the debugging session,
checkpoint now carries the omega cliffhanger forward
- ch06: open on the dare (invert 19 mod a 77-digit prime, two-digit
numbers only), machine-referee #eval after the Euclid box, checkpoint
distills the constant-time trade into one quotable sentence
- ch10: cold-open on the 12 GB crash, spec vocabulary re-armed at the
summit statement, falsification tryit after the 16p box (the -151
#eval), wall dispatch tied to the cold open, closing paragraph places
the certificate in the live log
- ch12: opening pyramid figure now carries question marks resolved
layer by layer through the chapter (suspense instead of spoiler),
kernel-wall rendered as a scene, 'Where you come in' promoted to its
own subsection, false 'closing chapter' removed
- appendix-toolkit: opens in the design-review room, Drill 7b (parity
argument), street assignment close
- appendix-walkthroughs: opens at the reader's low point, one-hole-one-
paragraph contract, counts replaced by 'trust the folder'
- appendix-repo-tour: active three-promise opener, sabotage-the-button
tryit, final tour stop at the transparency log
Build verified: tectonic clean, 118 pages, zero unresolved refs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
From the 7-reader didactic audit (control/BOOK-OVERHAUL-PLAN.md). The two
highest-leverage moves per the cold-open reader and the panel's most-repeated
finding.
MOVE 1 — the reader touches the real thing in minute one. The panel's single
loudest note: a book that teaches "demand verification" gave the reader
nothing to verify for twelve chapters. Now: the title page names
ltl.zkdefi.org (19 entries, one post-quantum, "verify every entry yourself by
the last chapter"); the preface opens on that page instead of a generic power
claim; ch1 gains a try-it box after the pyramid pointing at entries 13-16 and
18. And ch7's broken promise is honored — it invited "check one leaf" while
never printing the 71-digit Q; the exact Q from P25519.lean is now on the
page, no hidden digits (render-verified against the repo).
MOVE 2 — ch1 cold open. Per the cold reader who hooked at line 13 and wobbled
by line 31: the first worked box (a log10 re-derivation of a punch the prose
already landed) collapses to four lines, the mechanics pushed to Exercise 1.1
— getting the reader ~30 lines sooner to the headroom box, the genuinely novel
bit. The vague "In 2014, researchers…" opener becomes the actual bug: a
two-line diff captioned as the entire defect, anchored to the real Fiat-Crypto
S&P 2019 lineage (no fabricated CVE). Competitor roll-call → footnote.
Syllabus roadmap → a second-person promise ("by Chapter 7 you will have handed
a kernel a certificate…"). "Why Lean" vendor bullets → reader-inheritance
voice ("you start on a million lines of proved mathematics").
Builds here: tectonic, 116 pages, zero errors.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The book taught act one (getting a kernel to accept a proof) across twelve
chapters and never taught act two: the protocol that makes a green light mean
something to someone who was not present. ch11 armed the reader to interrogate a
CERTIFICATE and left the script that interrogates certificates — software the
author wrote, verified by nothing — entirely unexamined. That was the gap eight
rounds of external review found in the companion projects, and it is a didactic
failure of this book too.
ch13 teaches it from the war stories: the two acts and why act one is the easy
one (eleven theorems in two days, never disputed; eight review rounds and
eighteen defect classes to make the button over them credible); the single shape
every failure had (something load-bearing sat outside the binding), with the
demonstrated exploits including ALL GREEN over a repository proving False, a
certificate reduced to 'the loop equals the loop' with every fingerprint
byte-identical, and a stubbed compiler wrapper going green in 3.6 seconds over
destroyed proofs; completeness of binding and its four rules (derive the
population, fail closed on absence, exact not subset, a stranger must re-derive);
and the meta-defect of assertions that pass for the wrong reason, including the
tautological assert that appeared twice — the second time inside its own repair.
Closes with the habit to carry: ask both questions, and invite someone to attack
your button early, because none of the eighteen was found by the author.
ch11 now forward-references it at the point where the old blind spot sat.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- pen-and-paper worked examples in all 12 chapters, using the REAL
constants throughout: 2^-64 waiting-time arithmetic, headroom budgets,
hand type-checking, rfl traces, full goal-state boards, the column-sum
audit at 2^54, inverting 19 mod p via Euclid, the x19 fold at real
weights, denoting p itself (telescope), the 16p audit (8 fails by 151),
the 254+11 inversion-chain bookkeeping, the substitution test, sizing
the 28-vs-1000 extraction, cofactor/torsion arithmetic, and the full
Bernstein-Lange completeness derivation
- CORRECTNESS FIX: ch7 asserted a false factorization of p-1; replaced
with the computationally verified p-1 = 2^2 * 3 * 65147 * Q (Q 71-digit
prime), witness w=2 verified for all four Pratt conditions
- every chapter's exercises now followed immediately by 'Solutions and
pathways' (pathway first, then answer), incl. new exercises
- NEW Interlude: a complete two-clause verification done entirely by
hand, then mapped line-by-line onto the compiled Lean proof
- NEW appendices: A pen-and-paper toolkit (8 recipe cards + drills +
answers), B guided walkthroughs of every exercise-file hole, C tour of
the real repositories; plus glossary, instructor notes, 13-week plan
- preamble: worked-example box, solution macros, math-safe inline code
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- 53-page LaTeX/TikZ book (main.pdf + full sources): from zero background
to reading the real Ed25519/Pasta verification projects
- runnable exercises with sorry-holes + complete solutions for chapters
2-7, 9, 12; every solution file compiles clean (zero errors, no sorry)
against Lean v4.30.0-rc2 + Mathlib 5450b53e
- lake project pinned to the same toolchain/Mathlib the solutions were
verified with; students fetch the Mathlib cache, never build it
- honesty ledger in README: what was machine-checked and how
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
