Abstract

mathematicians for over 60 years. Amazingly, the Argonne team's automated theorem-proving program EQP took only 8 days to find a proof of it. Unfortunately, the proof found by EQP is quite complex and difficult to follow. Some of the steps of the EQP proof require highly complex and unintuitive substitution strategies. As a result, it is nearly impossible to reconstruct or verify the computer proof of the Robbins conjecture entirely by hand. This is where the unique symbolic capabilities of Mathematica 3 come in handy. With the help of Mathematica, it is relatively easy to work out and explain each step of the dense EQP proof in detail. In this paper, I use Mathematica to provide a detailed, step-by-step reconstruction of the highly complex EQP proof of the Robbins conjecture.