AI proofs are ending mathematics' romantic age of heroes
The Chalk and the Airplane
Mathematicians are reacting with panic, grief, and spiritual crisis as LLMs produce counterexamples to long-standing conjectures and flood the field with proofs. Terence Tao calls it the shift from proof scarcity to proof abundance and the end of the romantic era of mathematics. Others warn of lost funding, broken etiquette, and a dark age where human understanding atrophies. The essay compares this upheaval to industrialization and asks whether mathematics can keep its chalk-and-blackboard soul.
We are transitioning from an era of proof scarcity to proof abundance. For thousands of years proofs were hard... And now we found the shortcut. We found machines that can get these proofs for us and now we're drowning in proofs, but we're not getting all the understanding that we used to get.
- fwlr
There is no emperor distributing boons for the mathematicians of today.
Yes there is. The owners of the models will be the emperor, and we have already seen some suggestion for how they will distribute boons - consider OpenAI’s Navier Stokes result and how they offered co-authorship on condition of excluding the employee of a competitor.
There is also a subtle fatalistic fallacy at play in the author’s claims: “Progress is inevitable. This is progress. Therefore this is inevitable.”
But this doesn’t follow. We may reject this instance of progress, and allow the inevitability of progress to furnish us with another option.
- criddell
> The present proof relies in effect on an Oracle, and I say down with Oracles! They are not mathematics
Wasn’t reliance on oracles always going to be the endgame for mathematics (and probably physics as well)? Surely there are things we will never understand just like a dog will never understand calculus.
- robotresearcher
> There is no emperor distributing boons for the mathematicians of today.
This is a very weird take for an enterprise that depends almost entirely on grant money from either the taxpayer or charitable foundations.