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by 363849473754 1829 days ago
This is a proof assistant, not an automated theorem prover. The user has to supply* the mathematics and the proof checker formally verifies whether or not the steps are correct. It doesn’t have any creativity (that’s up to the mathematician).

*I should have clarified there is some proof generation, see the comment below by opnitro, but I meant the meat and potatoes of novel non-trivial proofs currently has to be supplied by the user.

2 comments

That's not quite true. Many of these proof assistants support some level of automation and proof search. I haven't used Lean specifically, but it's quite common in Coq for projects to write proof search techniques specific to the problem domain and utilize them in their proofs.
True, and Isabelle can call out to automated provers (a mechanism called "sledgehammer"!)
Thanks for the clarification.