Abstract

The year 2004 marks the fiftieth birthday of the first computer generated proof of a mathematical theorem: “the sum of two even numbers is again an even number” (with Martin Davis’ implementation of Presburger Arithmetic in 1954). While Martin Davis and later the research community of automated deduction used machine oriented calculi to find the proof for a theorem by automatic means, the Automath project of N.G. de Bruijn – more modest in its aims with respect to automation – showed in the late 1960s and early 70s that a complete mathematical textbook could be coded and proof-checked by a computer. Classical theorem proving procedures of today are based on ingenious search techniques to find a proof for a given theorem in very large search spaces – often in the range of several billion clauses. But in spite of many successful attempts to prove even open mathematical problems automatically, their use in everyday mathematical practice is still limited. The shift

Citations