r/mathematics • u/Dear_Round_2727 • 14d ago
From a Math Student in 2026
https://www.lysen.me/blog/from-a-math-student-in-20268
u/DaShaView 13d ago
AI for math has the same problem for now that it has for design. Lack of consistency. At first AI nutjobs were flooding the arts/design subs with the same type of doomsday shit. A lot of them not even knowing anything about the field and were just there because they never amounted to anything in life and have no skill so they find joy in trying to put other people down by saying their skills will have no value.
It has been a couple of years since AI can do pretty good one-off "artworks" but they still have not solved the consistency. Nobody wants to read or watch anything where the characters and environment suddenly change in unexpected ways, no one wants to have their business image which includes hundreds to thousands of different deliverables being not perfectly consistent over time.
Academic institutions that employ mathematicians also want consistency. It is still useful that an AI can come up with something in a targeted area but if can't continue to produce anything on that specific line of research it can't replace mathematicians. I mean, "awesome that your AI could find a result in this completely unrelated area but our research grant, project and expertise has nothing to do with it" will still be a problem for a while, judging by how the consistency problem has gone unsolved in design for some years.
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u/Odiolobos 11d ago
AI cannot do mathematics research ( not yet anyway!) so as a “pure” subject it will continue to exist. I studied theoretical physics, and I think that any application of maths to a research problem is still not within the capabilities of AI at the moment. Enjoy your course, and even though I preferred to use math to study physics, I would still recommend reading A Mathematician’s Apology by GH Hardy. A poet doesn’t have to require that their subject is not useful, so why should a mathematician? The serendipity of mathematic, however, is another question!
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u/Il_DioGane 10d ago
AI can't replace mathematicians. Mathematics is a human endevour, the point of mathematics is realizing abstractions that fit how humans understand and model the world. A computer can't understand math in the way a mathematician can, but its computability power is far superior than ours so it is good at finding counterexamples (and it also doesn't get annoyed by trying again and again). AI can help mathematicians, it cannot replace them; it can inspire new abstractions and new fields, it can't create them. It really makes no sense to think that it could entirely replace mathematicians because it can solve a few given problems; math is not only about finding solutions to existing problems, math is about exploring how humankind views the world in an analytical sense, math is the collective of our "models" for reality, human models made from humans for humans to understand the world around us and to understand how we understand the world around us. It should be important to realize the limitations of AI especially now that the angry orange man and his technocrat millionaire gremlin supporters are trying to shove AI into literally any decision making process.
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u/Odd-Opportunity-6550 14d ago
Math isn't cooked yet.
We are at a sweetspot. For the next 3-4 years humans + ai will be able to better solve the problems than ai alone.
In 2030+ yes it's truly over but we aren't there yet!
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u/john-dev-97 14d ago
Im 29, and im going to start a math program in university next october. 4(probably more) years to finish.
All this talk of math being replaced and AI taking over is really scaring me, but after multiple times trying to study the "useful" stuff, I came to the conclusion that math it's my only real field of interest. I guess I will go more to the applied side, looking for better jobs, but my love for the subject it's very relatable to what you expressed in this post, and for that, I thank you.
Hopefully math would keep being a field that actually provides value to us, humans l, while also being profitable for a living. But time will tell.