alt Hacker News> The story of human discovery and the triumph of the human spirit will soon be excised from this discipline. The Dinitz-Garg-Goemans counterexample was the most egregious demonstration. It revealed that the process of prompting novel proofs will be as auraless as ordering doordash. Watch as magic and mystery evaporate. Watch as the sun sets on our heroic age. Is there not something evil in the act of blocking all future generations of mathematicians from the experience of discovery? Forget about accuracy or even attribution. Something fundamental to the experience of mathematics is being taken.
> You are a helpless onlooker. Before you a channel through which humans have accessed the ineffable and sacred for thousands of years is being sealed for eternity.
https://kirwinhampshire.substack.com/p/the-dark-night-of-mat...
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This is absurd and silly. Discovery doesn't go away because more new things are being discovered. This position only makes sense if you make an arbitrary cut point where some instances "don't count". If you were to go back to scientists or mathematicians several hundred years ago and tell them that one day science would be done by tens of millions of full time researchers around the globe, often working in teams, some of them might also bemoan the loss of the "hero scientist" as any commoner could now participate. But science and math have only benefited from this, and this has increased, not decreased, the beauty and wonder in these fields.
As someone with friends in the mathematics community, they've expressed similar sentiments.
I have to wonder if this is the equivalent of teleporting back in time and finding Marco Polo or any of those early explorers who traveled for the love of the game (and fame and money), and opening up Google Maps on your phone and showing them the zoomed out world. And showing them any island or village they could name.