Employing Theory Formation to Guide Proof Planning

The invention of suitable concepts to characterise mathematical structures is one of the most challenging tasks for both human mathematicians and automated theorem provers alike. We present an approach where automatic concept formation is used to guide non-isomorphism proofs in the residue class domain. The main idea behind the proof is to automatically identify discriminants for two given structures to show that they are not isomorphic. Suitable discriminants are generated by a theory formation system; the overall proof is constructed by a proof planner with the additional support of traditional automated theorem provers and a computer algebra system.