ML for the Working Programmer is written by Paulson, one of the main persons behind Isabelle, and ends up with a prover project: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/MLbook/
Paulson teaches an undergrad course in Cambridge which is now using Huth & Ryan as a textbook. It's an incredible book that focuses on logic, SAT solvers and model checking. Probably the place to begin. An incomplete draft 2nd edition is in the authors website: ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/authors/M.D.Ryan/tmp/Anongporn/Ch1+3.pdf
If you are interested in tableaux techniques, First-order Logic and Automated Theorem Proving by Fitting is a good text.
Personally, I think the place to start from is Huth & Ryan. Logic is the calculus of CS. Then progress to type theory using a book like TAPL by Pierce or Proofs and Types by Girard.
Then, depending on your interests, you can proceed to model checking, program analysis and theorem proving. For the first two, the classics are Katoen and Nielson & Nielson, respectively.
This paper on Lean's type theory dovetails nicely with any of the kernel implementations: https://github.com/digama0/lean-type-theory/releases/tag/v1....
Also this article is really neat, thanks OP. These kinds of visual representations and other alternative mediums you can use to document stuff are (imo) a really important and under-explored area.
It's possible with access to something that almost serves as an oracle like this, we can use it prove deeper things that we do understand, with only the details of this one portion left un-understood. You could just assume a proposition is true or false, and do the same by working with the assumption, but that can quickly combinatorically explode with multiple propositions.
(E.g. Yin-Yang – A tool for stress-testing SMT solvers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25123138 They found a bunch of bugs in Z3 and CVC4!)
Math is something that happens in the human mind. It doesn't matter if the machine is uncovering the secrets of the Universe if no one can ever appreciate them, eh? I was explaining this to my sister this afternoon and to make the point I picked up a sliderule and slid the slipstick back and forth while pointedly not looking at the thing and asked her, "Am I doing math right now?"
- - - -
I'm trying to put together a simple, easy (relatively) to understand "stack" for this, starting with the theorem provers of Jens Otten: http://jens-otten.de/provers.html
(See also "How to Build an Automated Theorem Prover" http://www.jens-otten.de/tutorial_tableaux19/ )
Prolog is a very simple language, the theorem provers are only a dozen lines of code or so, and the sequent calculus prover at least generates proofs that I personally find easy to follow.
It doesn't go very far yet, but it's a start.
Any information on formal methods and automated theorem proving would be much appreciated.
(along the lines of:
Concrete Semantics https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22074483
Metamath Zero, a bootstrapping theorem prover https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21358674
The Future of Mathematics? [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200721
"Building the Mathematical Library of the Future" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060613