Lea: An Agent Backbone for Mathematician-Controlled Formalization in Lean

ABSTRACT

Agentic systems now formalize research-level mathematics in Lean, but they are built for autonomy: the mathematician states a target and inspects a result. The alternative, a general-purpose coding harness, is domain-neutral and must be assembled into a formalization workspace before any mathematics begins. Mathematicians, however, report wanting to keep high-level control over how an argument is decomposed and established. We present Lea, a Lean-specific agent backbone for mathematician-facing software rather than a single interface. Lea exposes runs, sessions, and typed events through one application-neutral API, and ships with Lean tooling (blueprints, LSP, Loogle, SafeVerify) already wired. We report two applications built on it: LeaChat, a web client for interactive proof authoring, and LeaOverleaf, which formalizes theorems annotated directly in an Overleaf document; a session begun in either continues in the other. In a case study, a mathematician outlined a proof of the Durfee square generating function in a few natural-language messages, and Lea produced a complete Lean development from Mathlib alone, following the intended decomposition closely and requiring substantive correction at a single point. Lea and both applications are released as open source so that further mathematician-facing tools can be built on the same backbone.