Generalization, lemma generation, and induction in ACL2

textFormal verification is becoming a critical tool for designing software and hardware today. Rising complexity, along with software's pervasiveness in the global economy have meant that errors are becoming more difficult to find and more costly to fix. Among the formal verification tools available today, theorem provers offer the ability to do the most complete verification of the most complex systems. However, theorem proving requires expert guidance and typically is too costly to be economical for all but the most mission critical systems. Three major challenges to using a theorem prover are: finding generalizations, choosing the right induction scheme, and generating lemmas. In this dissertation we study all three of these in the context of the ACL2 theorem prover.Computer Science