Many people with relevant expertise think there's a real chance that AI could kill us all in the not too distant future. Others disagree. I've written a post, aimed principally at mathematicians, detailing my struggles to decide what to make of this.
gowers.wordpress.com/2026/10/16/h...
A little over two months ago, Jacob Tsimerman surprised a lot of people by announcing, immediately after he had received a Fields Medal, that he would be giving up mathematical research and “pivoting to AI safety”. He had two reasons for this: that he did not see much future for the kind of research in […]
Dumping 722 synthetic math proofs on GitHub while ignoring academic pleas to stop hoarding proprietary models. Solving the universe with brute force, then offering to sponsor the afterparty.
[This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out, because I was not an artist. Then, they came for the mathematicians, and I did not speak out, […]
A new press release from the Simons Foundation, calling for workshops and other initiatives centered on mathematics in the era of AI.
it is a little funny that all of these openai math proofs aren't even like lean-checked so they have to keep pulling them because of sign errors and other silly simple mistakes. They're automating away the job of "weird guy who sends any mathematician with an university email their bad fermat proof"
On September 8, 2026, OpenAI announced a resolution of the Navier-Stokes problem. I had expected to feel excitement if a solution was announced. Instead, my reaction was one of grief and revulsion. I will use the announcement to explore the universal human desires that underlie my reaction, I hope in a fashion that will reach beyond mathematicians.
“The rapid escalation of artificial intelligence systems capable of automated formal statement translation and mechanical proof generation has induced an epistemological shift in mathematical practice. While platforms can confidently verify dense, multi-million-step formal proof objects, a stark divergence has emerged between mechanical correctness and human mathematical comprehension. […]”
This is the whole problem. They are flooding the zone with shit “proofs” that AI works, from math problems to even the meta shit of AI detection in literature (and not surprising it’s mostly black and brown authors that get accused) without any independent verification of their “proof”
"We found that the most gendered experience wasn’t work-life balance, the focus of most retention efforts. It was feeling devalued, in formal evaluations, but particularly in everyday interactions. Unlike every other topic, the gender gap in devaluation was larger among more senior faculty. " Read the study. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi2205 #womeninstem #math #maths
Prof Gio explains how math is in fact about showing your work. The point of math questions is to prompt the mathematics required to find the solution. Millennium Prize Problems are supposed to be an impetus for new theories that will revolutionize the world. LLMs saying 42 is 🤷♀️ #Mathematics #Math https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqiDqJMxg6o
[This is a guest post by Deanna Needell and Hayden Schaeffer – T.] AI systems are playing an important part in mathematical discoveries, and several recent preprints describe results reached with their help. What makes these results possible is often a rich partnership between human insight, expertise, and earlier work combining with new AI capabilities […]
Just a short note that First Proof is announcing the result of their “third batch” evaluation at a webinar at 3PM ET hosted by ICARM today. (Registration required.)
Anonymous Hello again. I say “again” not because I am personally familiar to you, but because a certain type should be—\text{\textemdash}and it is that type for whom I arrogate the right to speak. You may have forgotten us, but we shared your classrooms, study halls, and late-night problem sets not so long ago. But whereas […]
What if The Book was found tomorrow? Would we mathematicians leap for joy at the feast before us, eager to better understand even our best known theorems?
We consider the future of mathematics as a profession in a world where artificial intelligence may surpass human mathematicians in essentially every technical task. Through an informal dialogue, we explore why human mathematical expertise might nevertheless remain valuable, what kinds of expertise universities should cultivate, and how graduate education might adapt. We also discuss the institutio…
“The Topic” being, of course, the Mathocalypse, except sometimes with AI alignment and even quantum computing and complexity theory and other stuff thrown in. With Ryan Peterman: Notably, near the end of the above podcast, you can watch my live reaction to the news that an Anthropic model found algorithms for the 3SUM and the […]
I’m sorry but this is nonsense. You can soften it a bit to be not nonsense. It solved the Millennium Prize problem in a uninformative or disappointing way. It solved it via a loophole even if you want, although that’s really pushing it. But they did solve the problem as it is explicitly stated.
Great post -- Sophie makes an important point: the results OpenAI announced with great fanfare are "normal for the current state of technology".
The credit goes above all to the data -- the communal knowledge of mathematicians they relied to train their LLM
“We all know that OpenAI is not doing this “for the good of science”. These pdfs are exhaust fumes from their internal benchmarking effort.”
Not to toot my own horn but she's making exactly my point. The companies are producing normal bad work. Expert academics can do the same with available tools
In this interview Strogatz manages to reinforce plenty of the worst cliches about mathematicians: they're all men, Erdős was completely unable to live a normal life and popped amphetamines all the time, Perelman never cut his fingernails, etc. He analogizes the pleasure of solving math problems to masturbation. And the strange part: he seems to think this is all most charming. It's part of…
I've recently been taking part in a conversation on the Lean Zulip about what to do when a conjecture is resolved using AI and a proof assistant (in this case Lean). This is my take and conclusion from the discussion there.
AI is disrupting mathematics and people are scared to be replaced by machines. Here, I try to give historical and philosophical perspectives, which we direly lack of. We need to change our values, or we'll become proletarians and mathematics will die with us.
[This is a guest post by Sophie Huiberts, being an expanded version of a post on her own blog. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] When you prove a theorem, you are imparted a responsibility to the field of mathematics. At minimum you need […]
I’m collecting here a list of some other recent blog posts or opinion pieces on math and AI beyond the ones posted here or at Proofs and Prompts. Readers are invited to contribute further such links in the comments. Kevin Buzzard, “To grieve, or not to grieve?“ Alexander Gamburd, “The Siren Call of Silicon Leviathan: […]
In a general-public piece, I discuss how ideas can go from a conversation with an AI tool to a mathematical proof.
It leads me to wonder, how much plagiarism is there in the mathematical genius of bi AI?
In this brief reflection, I argue that the arrival of AI may not be bad news for mathematics, but the opposite. However, it requires a change of paradigm in which we do. I illustrate my viewpoint with the analogy of the discovery of new lands during the Age of Discovery.
This was just the same when OpenAI just slung a zip file with "proofs" that they hadn't verified. Many mathematicians hated it since making proof is about further the field through collaboration and building on already existing paper. What OpenAI did was just to shoot an shotgun through a wall.
This touches on something I have been thinking about. #Mathsky
I don't think we will ever get a 'community' answer to genAI in mathematics. For the simple reason that the community is too big (mathematics is one of the largest fields of science), the answers will be context- (and country) dependent
Here is one practical thing that many places have done for years: you only get to attach 3 papers, those are the only ones that will be looked at by the committee.
The game theory changes, because suddenly any additional low effort papers become uncounted wasted effort. You encourage strong work
The power lies with department hiring committees. When you fail to announce what you look for, that is creating the uncertainty for junior folks
“Free inquiry is a good in itself. The freedom to wonder, to play with an idea, and to follow a question belongs among the goods of a human life. It needs neither the endorsement of a corporation nor the leave of a mandarin class of caretakers. […]”
[This is a guest post by Kate Stange and Edmund Harriss. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] In January a group of mathematicians, historians, artists and educators gathered at the Institut Henri Poincaré (IHP) for a very unusual workshop on mathematical meaning. Our focus […]
I'm tentatively understanding the news about LLMs offering barely comprehensible solutions to hundreds of hard maths problems in the following way. #Maths is symbol manipulation according to set rules. You can do this task by training an LLM on a lot of maths writing. You don't actually have to understand maths to do maths, as long as you stick to the symbol manipulation rules. Nor does an LLM und…
Oh God, this is getting even worse: apparently the "source" of the claim that AI might have broken classical cryptography is the fact that some numbers are skipped in the OpenAI math dump. You know, that same dump that doesn't even have formal verification on more than half of the results and […]
“I believe that the development of AI tools will lead to a transformation of mathematics, both professionally and culturally. However, it will be a tragic missed opportunity if the massive shifts in culture and practice that are underway are motivated and influenced solely by AI. […]”
“I am a mathematician and a (theoretical) computer scientist. AI affects both vocations deeply. On the back of the recent AI-driven Navier-Stokes result, computer science colleagues joked that I am no longer needed as a mathematician. Of course the tables can be turned. […]”
Here's how Radchenko and Wheeler wrote about Imran Zaidi's LLM-generated proof: "While the proof seemed correct, it was not presented in a format that was easy or fun to check. We were left with three choices: do nothing, continue working at our pace and ignore LLM assisted proofs, or make our own LLM assisted proof. The first option was unacceptable based on the importance of the pro…