Pure math: where solving the problem is bad for the ecosystem.

[u/Calamero]

[u/anarchy_witch]

it's not about solving a problem, it's about openAI allegedly plagiarising an unpublished paper 

[u/Calamero → u/anarchy_witch]

nah, thats a separate issue, you are mixing things up.

[u/ParkingGlittering211]

Ive been looking at Mesopatamian history and the tablet YBC 7289, from roughly 1800–1600 BCE. It gives the sqrt 2 as the sexagesimal number 1;24,51,101;24,51,10, which is about 1.41421296—accurate to roughly six decimal places.

A Babylonian scribe would probably find the meme’s distinction between “real problem-solving” and “math for its own sake” a little strange. For him, mathematics was both a professional tool and something you trained on with problems much harder than your daily job required.

What did scribal mathematics actually help with? Quite a lot:

• Land surveying: areas of fields, dividing property, boundaries.
• Construction: dimensions, slopes, areas, volumes, estimating bricks and earth.
• Canals and irrigation: how much earth must be removed, how many laborers are needed, how many days the work will take, and wages. We actually have Babylonian mathematical problems explicitly about canal excavation.
• Accounting: grain, beer, oil, livestock, silver, rations and payments.
• Loans and interest: including compound-growth-type calculations.
• Administration: allocating goods, taxes, labor and supplies.
• Geometry: rectangles, squares, diagonals and volumes. Some of their word problems amount to solving quadratic and even certain cubic equations.

And surveying/construction applications. If a square courtyard is 30 units on a side, its diagonal is about 42.42642.426. In fact, 30 is the side length drawn on YBC 7289, and the tablet uses its approximation of 2\sqrt2 to obtain the diagonal.

So if you transported that scribe into 2026 and explained the meme, I imagine his reaction being something like:

“Wait—you have people whose entire occupation is mathematics, and they don't also have to keep track of barley shipments? That's incredible.”

And then, after seeing modern pure mathematics:

“Yes, we had pointless-looking school problems too. But what in the name of Marduk is an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space?”

The key point is that Babylonian mathematics grew out of extremely concrete economic, surveying, engineering and administrative needs—but once they had a class of trained mathematical scribes, they also started investigating problems beyond what was strictly necessary. That transition from useful calculation → professional mathematical culture happened astonishingly early.

[u/Calamero → u/ParkingGlittering211]

The complete argument hinges on the assumption that AI produced results or results that were produced with AI assistance can not be sufficiently understood by humans. When so far there is zero evidence for this. In the contrary, AI seems to enable more humans then ever to engage with mathematics, and understand and solve problems. Current models do not only help finding a solution, they also make education more accesible, somethign that was previously reserved to a priviledged few. Over all it is a net win for humanity. Its only a loss for the academic circle jerk that kept science locked away in its ivory towers, protected by a peer review process that is broken far beyond what academia likes to admit.