alt Hacker News> Recent events in the field of AI for mathematics have shown us beyond all reasonable doubt that the field is currently undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Language models are solving hard problems which humans could not, and mathematicians are reacting very differently to this news.
Software I understand but could someone please bring me up to speed what's with Mathematics that it is being disrupted too?
Replies
j45 • today at 6:46 PM
I believe some mathematicians will be able to solve problems humans can't solve, using models, which models can't solve on their own either.
Basically a similar technical disruption to what's happening in software engineering, but the implications are vastly different because the goals of software and math are not the same. For math, the disruption is leading to a deeper crisis of "what does it mean to be a mathematician?" Whereas for software "what does it mean to be a SWE?" hasn't really changed (the goal is to land software that does things for someone), rather the tooling has changed.
In more detail: in recent years there has been an effort to formalize mathematics using Lean and similar "theorem provers". You write your math proofs in a form of textual source code that Lean can verify for truth. But now Claude Code can produce source code to solve software problems (write me a tool that does X) and also produce source code to solve math (write me a Lean file that proves Y). Historically the main goal of math was to be solve big problems, but now Claude Code can do it. So what does a mathematician do?
Again, I think it's a more dire situation than for software because merely writing the code was never the full job. But for math writing the full proof kind of was.