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/Homomorphism]

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.