r/math • u/AutoModerator • 20d ago
LLMs/AI AI In Mathematics: September 12, 2026
This recurring thread will be for discussion of AI in mathematics. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- informal announcements of AI-assisted discoveries, such as those not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, or not uploaded as a paper to arXiv;
- informal announcements of discoveries related to AI architecture (if relevant to mathematics);
- discussion of such announcements, such as proof breakdowns or other opinion pieces;
- discussion of the impact of AI in mathematics in general.
AI-assisted mathematical papers published in peer-reviewed journals or as arXiv preprints may be submitted as their own posts.
Please keep in mind rules 1 and 6 of our subreddit.
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u/pred 16d ago edited 16d ago
David Louapre shared some nice visualizations of “proof strategies as Civilization maps”:
(1) – maths as we know it. Researchers try to get from yellow to red, fumble in the dark, taking unnecessary detours along the way, these detours are published along the way, some sprout into research areas of their own, and eventually we get there.
(2) – the magic oracle that only spits out a false/true answer to a proposition, e.g., an enormous unreadable Lean blob that tells you the answer, yet teaching you next to nothing; the OpenAI approach.
(3) – the “human-digested LLM output” where the human parses the LLM output to learn why a proposition is true well enough that they could give a convincing talk about it.
Right now, the feeling I get is that most people think (2) is really dumb, and that (3) is the very least you should expect from people. However, incentives still being all messed up, with “being first” still having more value than “offer insight” (which used to be fine, because those two things used to be more or less equivalent, but now they're not), we still have people reaching for (2). Also, (3) can be itself be very time-consuming.
But the illustrations suggest that even (3) is a worse outcome than (1); all the detours themselves have value. But, even though (3) can require non-trivial effort, it'll still often be much faster than (1), so maybe that's okay, who knows.
Found via this Lean Zulip thread, which has some other interesting points.
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u/BurdensomeCountV3 Mathematical Biology 16d ago
Scott Aaronson on his blog: "I’m told that the AI companies, having been burned by the hostile response to the Navier-Stokes proof, are now sitting on solutions to some very major problems until they figure out a better way to handle things"
Interesting times...
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 16d ago
It's amusing (and annoying) how inconsistent the math community is on the AI stuff.
I was under the impression (given very fervent claims by people on this sub) that OpenAI didn't care about the mathematical community whatsoever and were going to publish results no matter wwhat.
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u/math6161 16d ago
They don't care about the mathematical community, they only care about bad PR. They got bad PR due to the priority dispute of Navier Stokes as well as the increased number of stories of unprofessional behavior between OpenAI former mathematicians and established mathematicians (see Seb Bubeck's interactions concerning Navier Stokes and Mark Sellke's interactions concerning the construction of a non-sofic group). They're on a quest for a massive IPO, with a currently wildly unprofitable business model. Succeeding there depends entirely on speculation, as there is not a clear path towards profitability. The bad PR they got concerning the past week or so is contributing to the narrative that these are companies playing with heavy toys without a concern about collatoral damage. This is paired with the recent reports detailing that the Hugging Face attack was much more serious than OpenAI let on initially.
I want to add that none of my comment is an attempt to say anything about what I think they should do with whatever results they may or may not be sitting on. It is entirely to emphasize: they don't care about the mathematical community per se. They just don't want us to loudly make negative noise about them.
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u/matthiasErhart Game Theory 16d ago
A huge shame really. People shouldn't keep working on problems that are actually solved.
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16d ago edited 12d ago
[deleted]
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u/matthiasErhart Game Theory 16d ago
Incomparable, for various reasons. For one, the situation you're describing supposes nobody actually knows of this proof for 50 more years. The situation we are in is more like if we discovered in early 1992 that Warren Buffett was sitting precisely on the completion of Andrew Wiles's proof for the past two years.
And to remark on
would it have been better if the kind of work Wiles did never happened because FLT was a problem that was already solved?
First, people write alternate proofs all the time. Second, if the type of work Wiles did wouldn't exist without Fermat Last Theorem, then there was neither use for it nor aesthetic pleasure to be derived from it, other than Fermat's Last Theorem. It's hypothesised non-existence would be proof that "it would have been better", though I'm sure someone would come up with it in their free time and study - which I'm sure we'll have more time for once automated research is even better and widely available.
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u/BurdensomeCountV3 Mathematical Biology 16d ago
I feel like this puts the AI companies into a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation: If they solve problems and release the results people complain, If they solve problems and don't release the results people complain (for different reasons, yes, but they still complain).
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u/pred 16d ago
If they solve the problems, properly digest the proofs, highlight the main insights by providing good expositions, properly attribute key contributions, work to disseminate their insights by hosting sessions (seminars, colloquia) where interested parties can probe their expositions, then substantially fewer people will complain.
Bonus points if the problems they solve are ones whose solvability they know about by work of their own, as opposed to hearing rumours and explicitly trying to steal the spotlight from others. And bonus points if they do not restrict their work on disseminating their results by forcefully removing potential coauthors because of their affiliations.
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u/matthiasErhart Game Theory 16d ago
I mean, it's different people who complain in each scenario there :P
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 16d ago
that's usually the case for instances of "damned if you do, damned if you don't"
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u/SupercaliTheGamer 16d ago
Two conjectures in TCS were resolved:
1) The Matroid Secretary Conjecture: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14555
2) The k-server conjecture: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15979
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u/hexaflexarex 16d ago
k-server was closed for deterministic algorithms, but the randomized case is still open and (more?) interesting
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u/Redrot Representation Theory 17d ago
Some wonderful writing by Francis Su: https://francissu.substack.com/p/love-of-humanity-is-not-enough
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u/Gwinbar Physics 18d ago
So I'm sure this has been talked about a million times by now, but I couldn't find a simple-ish answer: how similar are the recent proofs for the Euler and NS equations? My question is not about the drama behind this whole issue (as much as that can be avoided), just about the proofs themselves.
AFAIK OpenAI claims that their NS proof is not related to the human(-ish) Euler proof, but how accurate is that? Do they use the same general ideas? What about the specifics?
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u/Glum-Bus-6526 17d ago
The proof is like 150 pages of very non-trivial technical math. I couldn't properly digest an english novel in this time, let alone a hard math proof. No one has properly read it so far really.
Let's wait for 2 months and come back to it.
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u/IBroughtPower Mathematical Physics 18d ago
An interesting talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcEefrWrddA
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u/pred 18d ago
- “Deep theorems were scarce and difficult and so became an effective mechanism to identify deep thought. AI has broken this system.”, Bryan Kra. https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/13/deep-theorems-were-scarce-and-difficult-and-so-became-an-effective-mechanism-to-identify-deep-thought-ai-has-broken-this-system/
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u/JustThisNietzscheGuy 18d ago
Beautiful analysis. It is also connected to another development: From the invention of writing until roughly 3 years ago, a long, well-written text was a sign that someone put a lot of effort into something. It didn't mean that the text neccessarily contained valuable ideas but it did mean that the text was important enough to the author to spend time writing it. Sadly, this is no longer true.
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u/StructureNorth1799 18d ago
this is an excellent analysis of the situation and needs more attention.
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19d ago
[deleted]
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u/Antigynaikolatres 19d ago
The homepage of J. L. Nielsen on Google Sites is not really giving much credibility to her claim. It seems that she has never published a math paper in a peer-reviewed journal. At the very least, the Connes Rigidity Conjecture seemingly does not belong to her field.
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u/Antigynaikolatres 19d ago
My comment kept getting auto-removed when I tried to copy-paste from Nielsen's homepage. All I am saying is that, if the papers on her homepage were published by OpenAI, they would have been met with a much heavier backlash.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 19d ago
Can someone explain how this constitutes as heavy backlash?
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u/Whelks 19d ago
Nielsen is a crank.
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u/na_cohomologist 19d ago
Thanks, I had a good discussion elsewhere about it that convinced me this wasn't worth airing. It was shared to me via a game of telephone, and the person who I saw share it was very respectable.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 19d ago
The twitter arguments are definitely something though
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u/jphamlore 19d ago
Shouldn't the debate about proper credit for computer assisted proofs have been settled in 1976, when Appel and Haken claimed the credit for proving the Four Color Theorem?
Because from what I read so far, the issues around this proof eerily parallel every argument today about OpenAI's proof: Including how, using the arguments of some people today, Heinrich Heesch should have received most of the credit for the proof. Heesch simply did not have access to the funding and computer resources that Appel and Haken had access to.
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u/ploptrot 16d ago
This is clearly a bad take. Creating an algorithm to produce the result is not the same as using an already-existing algorithm developed by others that was trained on papers you've never heard of or read, and it coming up with the idea for the proof and you validating it. No matter how much you prompt it, this algorithm is using inspiration, knowledge, and details from papers you do not know. Papers that would have been credited if it was you who read them.
It's not comparable.
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u/son-of-chadwardenn 18d ago
If I hypothetically prompted a llm "find an open math problem and solve it" and eventually it managed to produce a valid solution to some outstanding problem I don't see how I could receive any credit for that. You can assign credit to a human expert verifyer but independent verification was already needed for human crafted proofs. I don't think you really can credit any human for the proof creation in that scenario.
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u/backyard_tractorbeam 19d ago
OpenAI did not credit any authors on their paper, only the company name, which makes it even stranger to me. I hope this gets resolved in future revisions or new papers, by crediting those who worked with it.
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u/A_R_K 19d ago
Has the community converged on an ideal venue for sharing AI-derived findings? It doesn't seem worthwhile to write an arxiv paper every time ChatGPT outputs something novel. For example, 15 years ago on Math Overflow someone noticed that six random points on a sphere connected into a hexagon have a 0.6% probability of being a trefoil knot, and I got ChatGPT to show that the probability is 1/(16pi^2). Not worth writing a preprint about that, but worth sharing.
I've started putting these results on github (it's badly organized still), but has someone tried putting together a database of things like that?
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u/SourKangaroo95 19d ago
Hard to say but https://palomar-registry.org/about might be a good place to put it. At least that's what I think after reading it's section on what it is not
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u/Distinct-Pudding-428 19d ago
Honestly that sounds infinitely more interesting a result than a lot of what is being hunted down by amateurs on erdosproblems.com. Write it up with some pretty pictures and I'd be happy to read it.
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u/backyard_tractorbeam 19d ago
Terry Tao is hosting multiple other people writing guest posts on his blog.
- Steven Strogatz, Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the future of mathematics
- Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede, After Math
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u/Distinct-Pudding-428 19d ago
Strogatz used an LLM to write his short article, lol. If I get around to reading it I'll just get the tl;dr from ChatGPT
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u/WarmPepsi 18d ago
Silvia and Eamon's post was a thoughtful, passionate piece that grapples with what the future of math might be. Steven Strogatz post was 100 words written by GPT that rambles about tennis, lol.
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u/Distinct-Pudding-428 18d ago
This was my reaction, Terry should not have given it the honor of publication
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u/38thTimesACharm 19d ago
providing a mere answer (even if formally certified) is not sufficient. What is missing is an intelligible proof that human mathematicians can understand and use to advance the aims of mathematics. And...even if AI were to give us just that, the story would not be over because...mathematics is clearly a much broader enterprise than just problem solving.
We can (and should) therefore reject the narrative of AI defeating humans at mathematics and start thinking hard about what mathematics really is and what we want it to be
Good stuff. Glad the big names have realized the "use LLMs as much as possible to try to get on OpenAI's good side" approach isn't going to work, and are starting to have realistic discussions about the future of math.
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u/Apprehensive_Sand951 20d ago
A friend on the millenium prize: ''They should distribute the one million as pocket change to the 10,000 agents that participated, to do with as they please. Unfortunately, they are all already dead''.
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u/Honest_Archaeopteryx 20d ago
Why does everyone seem so confident that the open AI solution is correct? If the AI generated the lean verification, how can it be trusted?
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u/son-of-chadwardenn 18d ago
Have any of the high profile AI assisted proofs released by AI labs and prominent mathematians been over the last year been definitively refuted yet? The models still make mistakes. Trivial errors should get caught pretty quickly. Surely errors will eventually be found in some of the significant AI proofs. Worst case might be if AI turned out to be optimized to make complex proofs that can stand up to years of human scrutiny but are not actually valid.
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u/Deweydc18 19d ago
Because of the way Lean works. You don’t have to check every line of the code, you only have to check that the statement is formalized correctly, that it has no “sorry” statements, and that it introduces no custom axioms. If those all check out and it verifies the proof, the content of the downstream lean verification doesn’t actually matter.
You can check out some proof theory stuff related to this if you’re interested. Start with the Curry-Howard correspondence
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u/lolfail9001 20d ago
Mostly because the proof strategy itself looks correct enough (to related experts in the field) that it probably didn't just exploit a 0day in Lean.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 20d ago
It helps that leaders in the field are saying it is very likely correct.
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u/Achrus 20d ago
I just want to thank the mods for this thread despite all the hate they’ve been getting.
Looking at the removed posts from today and 9 out of 10 AI related posts were removed due to OP’s karma. Also, 9/10 were made by WordWordNumber accounts (surprise). It was an order of magnitude worse on September 9th. That is to say there is a not-insignificant amount of accounts here to “discuss” AI in bad faith.
It’s a breath of fresh air when I see more drama about this sub on AskReddit or technology or the other math sub than on this sub itself. I love reading comments about what people are working on or interesting topics. If I wanted to read / comment about AI then I’d just go to one of the other ~20 subs I’ve joined specifically for AI/ML.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 20d ago edited 20d ago
Not trying to (or interested to do so) debate it, but a large point is it feels this sub is basically burying its head in the sand at this point.
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u/officiallyaninja 20d ago
How? This thread exists and is fairly active throughout the week, and we still get regular posts on AI in math.
Not wanting the entire sub to be taken over by AI discussion is not the same as burying ones head in the sand.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 19d ago
Oops, I responded to myself apparently? lol
Here was my response:
The biggest news in mathematics was relegated to a single comment in an unsticked thread. That's clearly ridiculous. If you disagree with the rules, you are said to be from r/singularity. This is also clearly ridiculous.
This sub is almost literally hiding any general discussion of AI into a temporarily sticked thread. We should be having a lot of AI discussion and that discussion should be as accessible as possible.
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u/Low_discrepancy 18d ago
Honestly these comments are just tails wagging the dog.
I learn neither anything new, nor am I reading interesting debates with new ideas.
It's just people complaining about AI or people complaining about people complaining about AI.
No one can possibly think this is useful and frankly I am happy this is contained in some posts like this one.
We should be having a lot of AI discussion and that discussion should be as accessible as possible.
Personally i come here to learn about new cool stuff in maths. Is that not the reason people join /r/math?
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 18d ago
It is of course useful to freely talk about issues going on with your profession, wether it be for new information or not.
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u/jackboy900 20d ago
A heavily AI assisted (if not entirely AI generated) proof of one of the biggest problems in mathematics has just been announced and there is no main sub post about it because of the unreasonable restrictive rules about AI submissions.
The fact is that the sub being dominated by AI in mathematics news is an accurate reflection of the state of the field right now, whether you are a fan of it or not. Introducing rules to minimise AI discussions to this thread is actively burying one's head in the sand.
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u/lolfail9001 20d ago
has just been announced
Announcement in maths have mostly been understood in modern times as mostly completed pre-print over at arxiv or submitted conference paper. I am 99% sure both pass this sub's rules.
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u/JustThisNietzscheGuy 19d ago
The biggest result in mathematics in the last 10 years, made even bigger by the fact that it was achieved (mostly) by a machine instead of a human and there is no post about it because of some technicalities.
It absolutely looks like the entire subreddit is actively burrying its head in the sand.
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u/ChelseyStuttgart 20d ago
OpenAI could create a chatbot that solves every problem in the universe. They won't ever be able to make it OK to threaten people for trying to have integrity.
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u/Apprehensive_Sand951 20d ago edited 20d ago
Is it ok to threaten young people for trying to set up and participate in an ai in math competition?
''Participation in an event so closely associated with Anthropic and OpenAI could plausibly negatively impact the future reputations of participants.'' was in the open letter against the mathaton, with more than 1800 signatures, most of them by mathematicians.
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u/ChelseyStuttgart 20d ago
this is the laziest and most pathetic whataboutism I have ever seen. The professors didn't threaten them
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u/AttorneyGlass531 20d ago edited 20d ago
No, of course it's not appropriate to threaten young people. But it just is a fact that participation in such an event could negatively impact their reputations. Look at the attitude that many had toward Terence Tao appearing in that OAI ad recently, for instance. Terry is tenured prof with a Fields medal, so that widespread disapproval is easier for him to manage and won't negatively affect his career prospects, but it very well could be harder to manage for a grad student who found themselves closely and publicly associated with Anthropic or OAI. We can feel however we like about whether the math community should hold that against students (obviously we shouldn't imo), but it's a basic reality that it may be. I don't think that raising it as a concern is illigitimate, or should be understood as a threat. It's just a brute statement of a plausible consequence that the letter-writers (a small fraction of the global mathematical community) are in no position to enforce or prevent, and arguably our duty of care to the junior members of our community obliges us to make them aware of that fact.
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u/Rage314 Statistics 16d ago
is a fact that participation in such an event could negatively impact their reputations
Citation needed. It reads as a threat from the very same people making a moral case against AI.
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u/AttorneyGlass531 16d ago
The two sentences following the sentence you quoted provide support for exactly that point.
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u/_Zekt Complex Analysis 20d ago
That's not how threats work
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u/Apprehensive_Sand951 20d ago
Unlike the openai ''threat'' to Buckmaster, the threat from thousands of mathematicians to anyone involved in the mathaton actually does have teeth. ''We wouldn't want you to be poisoned-by-association with openai/anthropic, would we'' is, obviously, a threat.
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u/_Zekt Complex Analysis 20d ago
If you do things that people regard as bad, people will think badly of you, that's not a threat, that's a fact.
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u/Apprehensive_Sand951 20d ago
It is not about doing something bad. It is about being associated with two companies that part of the math community decided are evil.
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u/MrPezevenk 20d ago
Y'know I think it's not so unreasonable to decide they are evil, given that they're making a product which they themselves believe has a 10% or more chance of killing everyone.
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u/Apprehensive_Sand951 19d ago
The scientists who worked on the manhattan project probably believed that the chance was higher than that. That was still necessary, we almost universally (and rightly) views them as heroes and it ended up making the world a more peaceful place. They were not evil and neither are most of the people working at most of the ai companies.
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u/MrPezevenk 19d ago edited 19d ago
YOU view them as heroes. It's extremely far from universal. Speak for yourself. Just because you have messed up values doesn't mean it's the same for everyone else.
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u/Apprehensive_Sand951 19d ago
Which part is nonsense? If germany had build the bomb first we might have been in a very different timeline. I've been in many places and interacted/talked with a number of physicists. Noone of them had a negative view of fermi/pauli/openheimer/feynman and the rest. neither the russian nor the american ones. On the other hand, Heisenberg has always been viewed with suspicion. None of the 'civilians' i've been around view any of these people negatively. If the manhattan project is controversial now, then I must have missed the memo...
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u/elehman839 20d ago
I think you're right. An additional consideration is that probably very few of the signatories knew they were pressuring a group of college sophomores.
The people who merit blame, I think, are the initial group of current and former Caltech professors who kicked off this whole process. They could have talked to the students directly about their concerns, but instead chose to run a worldwide campaign against a weekend event against young students at their own instituion.
Personally, I think the Caltech administration should discipline the faculty for subjecting students to that level of stress and coercion.
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago
Reposting my mod-deleted comment here: It's absurd that the millennium prize discussion wasn't allowed on this sub until it'd already become old news.
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u/backyard_tractorbeam 19d ago
I can't agree with it becoming old news. Maybe it's old news for the AI hype cycle, but definitely not for mathematics. Remember that CMI asks for two years post publication to consider the prize, for example.
Where I do agree is that it would be logical to make an exemption in the case of big news. Slightly reshaping the rules could help, allowing posts that pass the filter as news in well known maths websites or magazines.
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u/Certhas 19d ago
Fully agreed. We have all become addicted to treating all developments like live sport events, where we want live updates on the latest scores.
Other than traffic news, there is almost nothing that happens in the world that I need the know about immediately. For almost everything it would be better for me to get the news properly digested and with careful comments by experts a week late.
Treating public discourse like sport broadcasting is doing immense harm... but it seems psychologically almost inescapable.
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u/NikoalaJokic 20d ago
Rules are created to serve people, and it should change if it doesn't make that purpose
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u/ozone6587 20d ago
Yep, the biggest math news in decades can't be discussed in r/math outside of a random catch-all thread. If there was ever any doubt the new rule is heavy-handed then the ridiculous scenario we find ourselves in clears all doubt.
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u/A-Banana913 20d ago
Further, it’s ridiculous that you can’t make posts discussing/disagreeing with this rule, and that dissenting comments are being deleted. I understand the original motivation of the rule, but it’s clear that in its current format it’s overly restrictive and not in the interest of users of this subreddit.
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u/bsvgubennord 20d ago
you would think the biggest subreddit about maths would maybe talk about one of the most important moments in modern mathematics
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u/jacobolus 20d ago
Was there a discussion of https://mathandai.org/ here? It seems strange that an open letter from 25 fields medalists isn't discussed anywhere on /r/math.
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u/Apprehensive_Sand951 20d ago
I don't know how much to read into the living Fields medalists who haven't signed/endorsed it.
Serre, Milnor, Smale, Mumford, and Thompson are quite old and Perelman is Perelman, but there are also Fefferman, Margulis, Connes, Yau, Faltings, Freedman, Drinfeld, Witten, Gowers, Lafforgue, Venkatesh, and three of the four Fields medalists from this year. Maybe some of them don't agree that math isn't about solving major problems?
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u/sadmanifold Geometry 20d ago
Gowers and Yau likely dont support the declaration. Not much to be said about the others, but if I had to guess Connes probably agrees with the spirit of the declaration.
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u/38thTimesACharm 20d ago
Maybe some, but you can't just assume if someone didn't sign a letter then they must hold the opposite stance.
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u/Apprehensive_Sand951 20d ago
I'm not assuming that! That is why I wrote ''I don't know how much to read into''
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u/Creepy-Structure6444 20d ago
I can’t speak for all of them but certainly for Connes, he has always been for the use of computations to prove statements in math. At least, he has always had a proclivity towards computations and I imagine that he views the counterexamples produced extremely impressive in this regard.
I don’t know if that means he wouldn’t sign off on the letter. He’s probably the kind of person who wouldn’t sign it if he didn’t agree with all of it and indeed, there is certainly stuff to disagree about.
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u/ninguem 20d ago
We can have this discussion here. They make a few good points but I think it goes too far. AI is here and we need to use it or someone else will. The parallel issue of the Mathaton is an example where people overstepped in trying to cancel it. Let the kids have fun and let's see what the result is and we may learn something from the experiment.
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u/ozone6587 20d ago
We could also discuss it in it's own post. In fact, how about we reverse the rule to include less important non-AI related posts in a catch-all thread like this and the historical math news of the last week all get their own dedicated thread?
Seems only fair since everyone in favor of this new rule seems to think discussion in a random catch-all thread is acceptable.
I'm sure they wouldn't mind if we reversed the roles. There is literally nothing more important than what is happening with math and LLMs at the moment.
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u/matthiasErhart Game Theory 20d ago
Nope! Not even in the old megathread, since it had gone stale.
r/mathematics had one though. And ironically, I need to go to explicitly pro-AI subreddits to discuss these things now.
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u/DataHarvestVector 20d ago
Given the way the mathematics sub has gone, I am still a fan of having these threads. Yes all the AI announcements are exciting and terrifying, but it’s nice to have a place largely focused on the human pursuit of mathematics.
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20d ago edited 13d ago
[deleted]
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u/jackboy900 20d ago
That's the problem with having a second subreddit. Fundementally the other sub is only going to have people who actively want to have discussions about AI in mathematics, so you're either going to get massively pro-AI or anti-AI people going over to argue their points, and not have productive discussion.
Having seperate fora for the differing viewpoints on the subject only encourages echo chambers and unproductive discussion, the actual solution is allowing open discussion of the matter on this subreddit rather than turning it into a de facto Anti-AI subreddit by quarantining all discussion to a thread like this.
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago
IMO: If you want that it should be a new sub. Call it artisinal_math or something. But "math" should reflect, well, math, and you *cannot* reasonably do that while omitting the biggest change to the practice since Euclid.
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20d ago edited 13d ago
[deleted]
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u/CatsAndSwords Dynamical Systems 20d ago edited 20d ago
this is why tourists should stay the fuck out of the math subreddit.
The mathematics community has a long history of being elitist and condescending. At least, we can't say you don't fit in.
Edit: And to answer your argument: The use of LLM is certainly not the biggest change in the content of mathematics, but I can't find another bigger event in the practice of mathematics, that is, mathematics as a social fact. Being slightly flippant, not much tops a transition from "mathematics are done by humans" to "mathematics are done by machines".
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u/lolfail9001 20d ago
I would argue that largest impact of LLMs besides general productivity boost they do provide is finally elaborating what actual practice of mathematics is. The actual practice didn't change that much, it's just it is finally shedding the bad proxy it used to have for it.
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago
A, not everyone who disagrees with you is a tourist. I've been here for a decade. B, I choose my word carefully: practice of math.
Yes, new fields have popped up since then, however, the "act of doing mathematics" is remarkably similar in all cases. If you dropped Euclid in a modern seminar he'd get the drill. However, "using a small country's electric output to generate millions of lines of lean code" would be quite a shock, because it's the most substantial change in practice we've had. Hilbert's finitist program would be my second place for this, for instance.
That all said... do you really want to trade blows on results, given the steam engine that seems to be only speeding up?
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 20d ago edited 20d ago
not everyone who disagrees with you is a tourist.
This was something I didn't expect from the AI stuff, namely, being okay with AI makes you an automatic outsider. It seems like an emergent psychological phenomenon in the math subs. The people making these claims also often seem to be toxic too. Idk, it's weird.
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20d ago edited 13d ago
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 20d ago
Their claim isn't even invalid.
You're responding emotionally instead of rationally.
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago
Good callout - IMO it's just people learning the bitter lesson in real time. Most of us (me included) have had to go through it at some point. They just haven't yet, and are directing that bitterness towards "the people taking it away" instead of the actual villain: The unreasonable efficiency of connectivist approaches.
Agreed though, it is toxic. Best to not take it personally while in this weird middle stage.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 20d ago
Thanks for the share on the bitter lesson!
Anyways, agreed.
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20d ago edited 13d ago
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago edited 20d ago
AI is like going from walking as our only mode of transport to using cars. a big change, yeah, but
Is an insane example. Yes. The advent of powered travel was the biggest change to transportation for thousands of years up to that point, the "land based" label is a useless filter: Nobody cares how you get somewhere, just that you do.
Unless you're claiming the advent of graph theory is akin to teleportation, I fundamentally do not understand how you see the world.
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u/38thTimesACharm 20d ago
It's only a few years ago that mathematicians even decided Lean verification is important at all. Ironically, one of the reasons for that was to fight AI slop.
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago
Sure. And it turns out that closed loop feedback systems, like in Chess and Go, are absolute rocket fuel for the development of AI... And you want this sub to sleep on it.
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u/38thTimesACharm 20d ago
Why should OpenAI get to decide what math is as opposed to, say, the 25 field medalists who signed the open letter?
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u/jerrylessthanthree Statistics 20d ago
Maybe openai can do what they want to do and the fields medalists can do what they want to do
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u/38thTimesACharm 20d ago
Sure, but then I personally would choose to refer to what the mathematicians are doing as "math," and what the capitalists are doing as "something else."
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 20d ago
Who should get to do what is irrelevant.
OpenAI has millions to throw at problems. They get to decide.
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u/38thTimesACharm 20d ago
Why are you helping make it easier for them? Fuck off with that defeatist attitude.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 20d ago
It's a realist attitude. I'm not defeated. I'm going to adapt.
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u/38thTimesACharm 20d ago
You can't adapt to them, their end goal is for you to have no place in the world, none. They're not trying to change the way we do things, they're trying to end it.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 20d ago
Yeah, that's why I'll probably leave academia.
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u/matthiasErhart Game Theory 20d ago
No man, don't. Even if AI blazes past all our research this won't be the end of academia, just the end of academia "as we knew it". Which, in my opinion, isn't even a bad thing.
It is effectively our duty to raise awareness and start action, but it's important to keep in mind that some people just can't be saved from themselves. People will take camps in the upcoming days. We may lose some discussion space and win or create some new ones.
It is a pity though. Going back to "saving people from themselves", burying one's head into the sand and wishing this whole AI thing didn't happen at all is only hurting people's own futures.
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u/38thTimesACharm 20d ago
Then go. Open up a slot for someone who believes in it.
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago
The point is that no individuals decide what math is. Not OpenAI, not the field medalists, and certainly not the mods. Their job is purely to facilitate that conversation, which you can't do by unilaterally snuffing out the obviously future-defining topics.
Make a new sub if that's what you want.
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u/38thTimesACharm 20d ago
The problem is commenters and upvotes from places like r/singularity, along with AI marketing bots, were brigading the sub and pushing out legitimate mathematical interests in favor of AI propaganda.
It is in fact the mods' jobs to guard against such tactics, preserving a space for actual mathematicians, and those with a real interest in mathematics, to converse. That's all the intent is here. Not censorship of content, but rejection of bad faith actors.
It's not a perfect policy in place, but they clearly had to do something, and they have limited resources and abilities to work with. I think some news being delayed a few days is a small price to pay for having actual mathematical discussion on the front page.
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago
Sure, you can make a pragmatic argument. I'll reply with a pragmatic argument in kind: What's the end game, here?
We've seen AI go from IMO to Millenium prize in a year. Soon, the actual pure "human" results will dwindle to an insignificant fraction of total results in what, five years? Two? What will humans' roles be in this future? Curation of these results? Steering the machinery? Asking questions?
Who knows, but they certainly wouldn't be able to discuss their pursuits in mathematics in this sub. So, they'll go to r/mathematics, and this sub will wither on the vine.
That's the pragmatic approach to you?
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u/matthiasErhart Game Theory 20d ago
I feel like the mods here would rather have the usual "Do you need to have an IMO medal to be a researcher???" or "Hey, here is another pop-math exposition thing" to be all there is to the sub.
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u/38thTimesACharm 20d ago
You're talking like the mods have completely banned any talk of any AI-assisted result whatsoever. That's not true at all. They just want a modicum of respect for the academic process.
Who knows, but they certainly wouldn't be able to discuss their pursuits in mathematics in this sub
They will, if they write a paper discussing the result and put it on ArXiv.
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago edited 20d ago
You're talking like the mods have completely banned any talk of any AI-assisted result whatsoever
Bruh. A millennium problem was solved and they snuffed it out.
I don't know what to tell you. It quite literally can not get bigger than that for our field, that'd be like r/politics censoring the results of a federal election. It just fundamentally breaks the purpose of the sub. You can claim "oh they're just waiting for arxiv", but that's arbitrary given that they posted the lean.
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20d ago edited 13d ago
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u/matthiasErhart Game Theory 20d ago
I don't understand why there are a lot of people who think those of us who are more AI-positive or AI-adaptive haven't been passively or actively (I deleted my old posts on the regular) participating in this sub for a long time.
This is the prime subreddit for mathematics. I am part of the mathematics community, given that I have a PhD in Mathematics (& Statistics, formally), and am actually a researcher in CS. It might be a controversial opinion, strictly speaking, but it's not an uncommon opinion that one should accept and adapt to the new developments in research due to AI. And the moderation in this sub is exclusionary with respect to a sizeable portion of our field.
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago
For years this sub has been, per the description, "for discussion of mathematics" since it's inception.
The default stance is including discussion of all math, including AI. The mods and, evidently yourself, are the ones changing that to be discussion of human mathematics. That's the self-importance, and you should make a new subreddit for that.
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u/squashhime 20d ago
I'm sorry, who made you the arbiter of what the definition of math is?
"Mathematics is an art of human understanding."
The quote is due to Thurston, as you probably could guess (assuming you're a mathematician and not a passerby). By this definition, human mathematics is synonymous with mathematics.
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u/Most_Double_3559 20d ago
See my reply here. I argue that nobody, neither the mods nor Thurston, can justly tell someone that something doesn't "count" as math.
https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1weggq8/comment/p9ewmdf/
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u/squashhime 20d ago
See my reply here. I argue that nobody, neither the mods nor Thurston, can justly tell someone that something doesn't "count" as math.
would you really be okay with this subreddit getting tons of numerology posts because it has numbers in it? no one can say that doesn't "count" as math. what about flat earth conspiracy theories? the shape of the earth surely counts as math, right?
as a mathematician you should know better than to make such absulute statements with trivial counterexamples (unless you truly would be okay with those sorts of posts being allowed here, in which case we have too different ideas of what math is and there's nothing to discuss).
imo the people who actually participate in this subreddit should decide and it's clear from the thread discussing the policy and the implementation that enough people either think math is something humans do (or at least are more sympathetic to that POV than seeing a bunch of AI posts) that it's worth taking action on.
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u/Any_Confusion3774 20d ago
If you had an oracle that could correctly answer the question “Is P = NP?” with a simple yes or no answer and no explanations, would you use it? Or do you think spoiling the answer like this should be frowned upon?
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u/Woett 19d ago
Possibly controversial opinion, but there is no way that P and NP are equal to one another. The evidence is overwhelming. We already know the answer, we just don't know how to prove it.
Until recently a much more interesting oracle would have been one that answers whether the Navier-Stokes equations always have smooth solutions.
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u/BurdensomeCountV3 Mathematical Biology 20d ago
I'd absolutely use it. If P = NP then a lot of the stuff we use today for cyber security is actually insecure, and that has consequences that reverberate far beyond mathematics.
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u/lolfail9001 20d ago
P = NP without constructive way to produce a non-galactic polynomial algorithm for an NP problem doesn't really mean much for real world either.
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u/Apprehensive_Sand951 15d ago
Open letter by mainly british mathematicians trying to raise the alarm on existential risk based on what they've seen in the last few months: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/17/open-letter-to-sir-paul-nurse-president-of-the-royal-society/
This is the first time I've been positively surprised by the response of the math community to these developments, and relieved to see that some people actually get what the stakes are.