Book excerpt: This book is a translation of Professor Wu’s seminal Chinese book of 1984 on Automated Geometric Theorem Proving. The translation was done by his former student Dongming Wang jointly with Xiaofan Jin so that authenticity is guaranteed. Meanwhile, automated geometric theorem proving based on Wu’s method of characteristic sets has become one of the fundamental, practically successful, methods in this area that has drastically enhanced the scope of what is computationally tractable in automated theorem proving. This book is a source book for students and researchers who want to study both the intuitive first ideas behind the method and the formal details together with many examples.