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irchanstoday at 5:54 PM0 repliesview on HN

I also "had an Iron Man moment last week" as a mathematician. I've been doing joint math research with two friends (professors) on a project for several years. Last week, I decided to explore part of our research using chat GPT. 1) I would have a thought. 2) Present it to GPT. 3) Ask GPT to write theorems that were easy to prove and put those proofs into LaTeX. (I always have to check the proofs carefully.) 4) Then I would ask it to generate code (I mostly use Mathematica the language.) 5) Running the code would help verify the proofs. It would also inspire more thoughts and I would go back to step 2). This worked very well, but at one point I could not bound a particular expression and I was not understanding it well, so I got out the pencil and paper and redid the derivation myself which helped a lot. This whole process worked about 10 times faster than doing it without GPT. At the end of a couple of hours I had around 20 pages of correct proofs and all the code needed to do numerical simulations related to the proofs.