The Coq Development Team, The Coq Reference Manual: Release 8.10+alpha, (lire en ligne), p. 3 : « Automated theorem-proving was pioneered in the 1960s by Davis and Putnam in propositional calculus. A complete mechanization (in the sense of a semidecision procedure) of classical first-order logic was proposed in 1965 by J.A. Robinson, with a single uniform inference rule called resolution. Resolution relies on solving equations in free algebras (i.e. term structures), using the unification algorithm. Many refinements of resolution were studied in the 1970s, but few convincing implementations were realized, except of course that PROLOG is in some sense issued from this effort ».
