Abstract. Techniques based on sums of squares appear promising as a general approach to the universal theory of reals with addition and multiplication, i.e. verifying Boolean combinations of equations and inequalities. A particularly attractive feature is that suitable ‘sum of squares ’ certificates can be found by sophisticated numerical methods such as semidefinite programming, yet the actual verification of the resulting proof is straightforward even in a highly foundational theorem prover. We will describe our experience with an implementation in HOL Light, noting some successes as well as difficulties. We also describe a new approach to the univariate case that can handle some otherwise difficult examples. 1 Verifying nonlinear formulas over the reals Over the real numbers, there are algorithms that can in principle perform quantifier elimination from arbitrary first-order formulas built up using addition, multiplication and the usual equality and inequality predicates. A classic example of such a quantifier elimination equivalence is the criterion for a quadratic equation to have a real root: ∀a b c. (∃x. ax 2 + bx + c = 0) ⇔ a = 0 ∧ (b = 0 ⇒ c = 0) ∨ a � = 0 ∧ b 2 ≥ 4ac

We consider the problem of finding closed form solutions of linear differential equations having coefficients which are elliptic functions. For second order equations we show how to solve such an ode in terms of doubly periodic functions of the second kind. The method depends on two procedures, the first using a second symmetric power of an ode along with a decision procedure for determining when such equations have elliptic function solutions while the second involves the computation of exponential solutions.