In The Wake Of The Latest Unprecedented AI Proofs, What Now For Mathematics And Mathematicians?

In this view, mathematicians will still prove theorems and come up with counterexamples, but they will do it because they enjoy it, not because their career depends upon it. Society will benefit from the coming flood of new AI-derived results, as we move from an era of proof scarcity to an era of proof abundance, but there will still be a place for human mathematicians to interpret those results, to pass them on to the wider community, and to build on them, probably using AI to do so. In this respect, they will become what the “technical philosopher” Logan Graves calls “priests”

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AI’s Secret

The proof uses “an infinite unramified tower
Of real number fields with 3-power
Galois groups of growing degree”, the ab
-stract says of the lush maths in AI’s fab
-ulous and first refutation of an Erdős guess.
The chain of thought runs to no less
Than 125 pages, as the LL
-M chugged away in a pell-mell
Orgy of random logic, until the chasm
Was bridged.  Undaunted by the human phantasm
Of failure, undistracted by feelings, immune
To dying in a pointless duel far too soon,
AI's galling secret that will make it our lord
Is a patient digital doggedness that never gets bored.

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Moody Sonnets