alt Hacker NewsA Mathematician Reads the AI Future
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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.
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?
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
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
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.