alt Hacker News> The week before Christmas 2025, five mathematicians were holed up in a classroom at ETH Zurich.
So happy this didn’t end with, “tweaking their prompt for ChatGPT Sol” or whatever.
> He, Diskin, and Radhakrishnan made some progress and brought their results to Sudakov and Tassion. As Tassion took in their work, an idea — perhaps an outrageous one — formed in his mind. … Over those weeks, the collaboration became frenzied. The mathematicians traded ideas constantly, often texting late at night.
It will be a truly sad world if we automate this away.
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I understand the sentiment and even feel it myself as a software engineer because there is/was so much ego wrapped up in these kind of skills. However, I have kind of gotten over it because I am now hopeful that AI may now help us solve problems at a much faster rate now that we could before and I think this is actually exactly what we need right now to solve things like climate change etc. If that means that humans don't get all the credit anymore then oh well, at least we may actually have the chance to solve some big issues now.
What’s so awesome about this? People texting about their ideas?
They are performing cognitive labor. Good for them I suppose but what is so romantic about this particular type to deserve these types of responses?
Incidentally, Duminil-Copin, who also works in percolation theory, wrote an essay on the impact of AI on math.
https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/08/30/care-for-a-little-mo...
I'm totally in favor of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. But if a non-human agent had been one of those participants, does that subtract from the value of the result? I don't think so.
>It will be a truly sad world if we automate this away.
In my opinion, research can't be fully automated because the space of possible problems is too large. You need humans to decide which problems are worth spending time on, and to evaluate which results are important. We might expect AI to automate some of the routine aspects like searching for counter-examples or formalizing proofs, but that will free up resources for humans to focus on the big ideas and the direction of research.