Deduction Systems

The idea of mechanizing deductive reasoning can be traced all the way back to Leibniz, who proposed the development of a rational calculus for this purpose. But it was not until the appearance of Frege's 1879 Begriffsschrift-"not only the direct ancestor of contemporary systems of mathematical logic, but also the ancestor of all formal languages, including computer programming languages" ([Dav83])-that the fundamental concepts of modern mathematical logic were developed. Whitehead and Russell sh