A Milestone Reached and a Secret Revealed.

In this special issue of the Journal of Automated Reasoning, this article sets the stage for the succeeding articles, all of which focus on finding proofs of theorems of formal logic and on the various methodologies that were employed. The proofs that are offered mark an important milestone for automated reasoning and for logic, for each of them is indeed new. One key question this article answers is why an automated reasoning program was able to find proofs that had eluded some of the finest mathematicians and logicians for many, many decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]