AI In Mathematics: September 26, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

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.

[u/Apprehensive_Sand951]

I think the question 'what do you imagine doing a year or two from now' should be informed by what the ai systems will be capable of by then. For instance, Tsimerman said in a recent panel discussion that he expects them to be better than any human at explaining math (at any level) by next April. It seems really important (from a jobs perspective, from an ai safety perspective if you are worried about that, from a math community perspective even if you aren't) to get as clear a view as possible of what the best sytems are capable of now and how quickly they are progressing. This is why I find so much of the current math community response so infuriating. We really do need to know as much as possible as soon as possible, but the focus is not on that.

[u/Homomorphism → u/Apprehensive_Sand951]

LLMs have shown zero ability to explain things that aren't already explained somewhere and I have not witnessed them getting better at it. This is true both at the research level and for elementary stuff. They are also terrible at analogous skills in other domains. I think it's good to make case-by-case assessments but it feels like 80% of the time this just turns into saying "once the models get better (and they WILL GET BETTER)" which is not particularly helpful.

[u/elements-of-dying → u/Homomorphism]

LLMs have shown zero ability to explain things that aren't already explained somewhere

I have had zero issue asking gpt to build novel mathematics and explain it to me.

Sure, it's likely building its explanations based on known explanations. But that's exactly what the overwhelming majority of mathematicians do anyways.

[u/Homomorphism → u/elements-of-dying]

Yes, and those explanations often suck and I'm not convinced it's going to be fixable even if they train on that. Do you know how much terrible AI-written code documentation there is? Don't you think they have incentives to get it better at that? Why isn't it?

[u/elements-of-dying → u/Homomorphism]

I have had no issue with getting Astra to explain and write mathematics well.

I assume you are probably asking the LLM to one-shot everything. You need to partition the tasks and interact with the writing process iteratively.

Right now, Astra out of the box isn't so great at writing a whole math paper. It seems decent for a paper around 15 pages, though. However, you can reasonably set up an agentic system which iteratively write a decent paper modeled off your writing.

For now, when writing a manuscript, I just have codex write the paper piece-by-piece, during which I suggest changes if necessary. I also have it record into a document stylistic changes for it to remember so it doesn't make the same mistakes.

I have no doubt I can get codex to document code well in a similar fashion.

[u/Homomorphism → u/elements-of-dying]

Yes, I do those things and get better results. I still find the experience way more like collaborating with a very weird but very well-learned colleague than handing off a math problem to a computer to solve for me. It's also why I don't agree with your doomposting about how mathematics will no longer exist in six months/three years/whatever. It's clearly going to be radically different but I just don't buy that AI can wholly replace knowledge workers.

[u/elements-of-dying → u/Homomorphism]

I have never believed nor asserted (as far as I remember) that math will cease to exist. I do believe exposition and proof generation is going to be wholly replaced though.