alt Hacker NewsFor what it's worth, most mathematicians are paid to teach, and the amount of research funding going into mathematics is relatively small. Plus, there are rare but important broader advancements due to pure and applied math that are hard to predict in advance (e.g., cryptography, compressed sensing).
Mathematicians also decide what to prove in their research - taste is not a skill we have RLVR'd away (yet, not claiming this is fundamental).
Of course, the field is being fundamentally transformed, it will probably end up looking more like experimental science in the future.
Do you think it’s possible to operate math research in a fully autonomous way (i.e. with no human expert involvement)?
As a software engineer, my mental model so far is that OpenAI made a gigantic (but potentially sound) pull request to the math community, and the mathematicians just did not have enough bandwidth to review and merge it.
If my model is correct, I guess it makes a lot of sense to fund mathematicians, because their lack of resource is the bottleneck here.