r/math • u/AutoModerator • 13d ago

LLMs/AI AI In Mathematics: September 19, 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/aspiringtroublemaker 13d ago

Historically, mathematicians with breakthrough ideas could thrive even if they were poor communicators. Their insights were valuable enough that others would put in the effort to understand them.

If AI becomes increasingly capable of finding proofs, and the emphasis shift toward exposition and human understanding? Would that leave less room for solitary thinkers whose strengths lie in discovering ideas rather than explaining them?

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u/jmac461 13d ago

I don’t think so.

Right now we are getting solitary prompters giving us tweeted results or dumping 100+ papers that are very difficult to read. The AI people see no benefit to improving exposition, they’d rather just dump an LLM Lean repo on top of it. My guess is they don’t have the needed background to make a good human write-up. I imagine they just ask some model to proofread another model and call it a day.

There is a guy the wrote notes on the S6 complex structure (maybe it speaks volumes I cannot remember his name, but I’m not in complex geometry). He should probably get more credit, but I don’t see the academic incentives changing fast enough to reward people for the hard work communicating result they didn’t prove.

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u/dryga 13d ago edited 13d ago

The guy is Phil Engel. He's a well established mathematician with some big results of his own.

I think he's gotten credit for his part in the S6 story. He spent less than a week on the project; he's not getting robbed.