alt Hacker NewsA mathematician reads the AI future
Comments
As a mathematician turned Wall Street Quant & trader (and now part-time CS faculty), I do not particularly like unsolved problems. I no longer get thrills from solving problems, rather I care about finding them solved. In that sense AI is a cure (for my poor coding!) and a good part guide. But it doesn’t solve things on its own. AI directed intelligently (& critically) does great things but AI without produces slop when used uncritically. The AI could have done nothing without a human making open conjectures and a human prompting it, often again and again.
I have used AI in academic papers to generate a theorem & proof when the result seemed obvious (but the referee asked!) and I had done all the earlier heavy lifting. I have never used an AI output I didn’t fully understand and that is crucial. It lies and hallucinates and we must police it.
Academic math will be the hardest hit. It needs to pivot quickly. This is the real challenge. Individuals can move quickly but how do you get institutions to do so?
Looking forward to brave new world when mathematicians become AI whisperers. And they are rewarded for their skill in discovering and co-discovering new and exciting areas.
Once IBM deep blue beat Kasparov in chess, IBM stopped their chess playing research.
The marketing goal, if you will, had been met and IBM would continue their actual money making business of selling mainframes and doing consulting.
The same thing will happen with AI companies’ endeavors into abstract maths.
Maths however will be changed - students can no longer be taught via the same homework - and mathematicians will have to do more computer work and probably work in larger groups of people.
Hopefully we can put this aside quickly and move on to using AI to solve great scientific/philosophical problems such as the theory of everything and the hard problem of consciousness.
The thing that is so confusing about this is the following fact -
Lets say the frontier of some specific problem or a field in math is at x. X was reached over millenia by incremental steps and sometimes to leaps and jumps.
Now if AI gives us a x + 1 or x + 10 state, aren't there still x + infinite steps to climb? Many of this the AI can never imagine and won't reach by itself without human assist.
Yes, there is a temporary shock and awe because of all the low hanging x + 1 through x+ 1000 fruits for a given sub-domain/problem have been carpet bombed or whatever.. but isn't it turtles all the way!? Won't people soon find something more to develop and solve that takes it further than where it was of this infinite realm of exploration?
Could the press kindly interview one of the 1008 members of the AHM (https://www.ahmath.org/members). Maybe Peter Scholze if you need a Fields Medalist:
https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/20/who-will-become-the-...
We only hear from a mix of doomers and fanboys in the news.
Welcome to the party pal.
- this will never work - it’s slop this is unusable - ok its correct, but this work is a mess - I’ve been mandated to use it. It’s cost effective - ok we need to find a way to use this output to our advantage - I can always work on my interests in my free time - well, I have to pay rent and this life wont go on forever and there are may people who hate their jobs - I am lucky to have a job - who cares anyway - it’s got electrolytes
AI could bear out, but it seems a lot of hype to me. Does anyone remember how Japan built up AI and their 5th generation language (Prolog) in the 1980s?
> Someone asked him what he thought of the AI proof. Justin said he didn’t know. He hadn’t read the paper yet. He said he’d been “too busy.”
> That astonished me. Too busy to look at a problem he had been dreaming about for 19 years? “I am genuinely busy and probably wouldn’t be able to get to reading a human’s proof immediately either,” he told me afterward, by email. “It does not help that AI does not write mathematics particularly well.”
Given:
* The human mathematicians can't solve the problems.
* The slop engine can't write well enough to make its purported solutions readable by human mathematicians.
* Sam Altman is a frivolous liar.
How is it possible to know whether the problems have been solved at all?
Maths is made of two parts: questions, and solutions.
Machines could, presumably, become good enough at hammering at solutions. But they won't be very good at finding questions. Because questions are infinite. And to a machine, all these questions are the same.
Questions are "good questions" because they are good questions *to* humans. And that's what makes human mathematicians (and scientists) so important
[dead]
> But for many “pure” mathematicians ... machines can discover the truths we’re seeking, at the cost of robbing us of the struggle and joy of discovering them ourselves.
This sentiment is akin to wanting to curse humanity to darkness because they're not the one carrying the candle. Strogatz is not lamenting the loss of discovery, he's lamenting the loss of being heralded as a hero for the discovery.
Nothing prevents him or others discovering truths for themselves. Turn off the computer and try to re-derive it from first principles. Have at it! This is what students do in many courses anyway.
I've found little so depressing as being at the precipice of a renaissance of science and mathematical discovery, only to see how resistant the scientists and mathematicians are to it. It lays bare their counterarguments. Any pretense of wanting to discovery fundamental truth about reality is supplanted with "but what about our careers!?". Strogatz, and others like him, should be ashamed of themselves.
I guess as a physicist I am more hopeful - every revolution in how the world is understood (by humans) has been driven by new tools and data. Being able to measure single quanta, for instance, showed us just how weird and counter-intuitive the Universe can be. I think AI might do something similar for mathematics - make connections that a human brain might have missed, and so advance human knowledge.
But I totally get the anxiety - it's a real John Henry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)) moment for the mathematics field. Clearly this is going to restructure how mathematicians are going to be trained and how they work.