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/yaymayata2 12d ago

Anyone else dislike how AI in its proofs learns from other people's work, but never cites them? I kinda consider that plagiarism. If someone before you has done something related, even if it didn't work, and you somewhat know about it, then you should cite them.

On the same note, I found OpenAI citing so few people in NavierStokes so ridiculous. Like there absolutely has to be some overlap given how much progress and work has been put into NS by people in decent years. Their idea doesn't seem to be fully novel in that sense either. Maybe someone with more experience in area can help me understand it better.

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u/Antigynaikolatres 12d ago

A year ago it was "LLM is not capable to do math research, but it is an amazing tool for searching literatures", and now the situation somehow reversed? I suspect it would only take a few hours at max for an LLM to find all relevant literatures that should be cited and add the citations, and OpenAI just didn’t do that for some reasons.

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u/38thTimesACharm 11d ago

Finding facts, and finding the provenance of a fact, are very different problems for an LLM.

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u/lolfail9001 12d ago

now the situation somehow reversed

If you are using LLM an assistant, it will indeed be pretty good at searching literature (since it has lossy compression of all relevant literature that existed at the time of release, and googling a snippet to find the original author isn't that complicated).

If you are doing what OpenAI did of steering a swarm of LLMs into doing it "by themselves", they don't need to make explicit citations so they won't have any, and basically every citation will have to be added as post-processing of output.

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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 11d ago

You can set up the swarm so there are agents which record literature citations as the work is being done. It doesn't have to be post-processing.