Working with Mathematical Structures in Type Theory

We address the problem of representing mathematical structures in a proof assistant which: 1) is based on a type theory with dependent types, telescopes and a computational version of Leibniz equality; 2) implements coercive subtyping, accepting multiple coherent paths between type families; 3) implements a restricted form of higher order unification and type reconstruction. We show how to exploit the previous quite common features to reduce the ``syntactic'' gap between pen&paper and formalised algebra. However, to reach our goal we need to propose unification and type reconstruction heuristics that are slightly different from the ones usually implemented. We have implemented them in Matita