Steven Strogatz writes:

It’s 4:26 a.m., and I’m walking around the house while my wife sleeps upstairs. I’m feeling disoriented and discombobulated, just as I have for months, since May, when AI came for math.

The leaves are ablaze here in Ithaca, fiery reds and oranges, and I saw them swirling around in my backyard yesterday, following the streamlines of an eddy described by the Navier-Stokes equations. You’ve heard of Navier-Stokes, right? By now you must have—in early September, OpenAI claimed to have solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. An internal AI model unleashed about 10,000 agents that ran for 88 hours straight and gnawed on the old problem until it yielded.

I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis. Nobody in math is ever going to forget the year 2026. Unless this is really the end of the subject, and then nobody will remember anything about math anyway. Well, the machines will remember. But for them, this is something like day one.

I’ve been trying not to talk like this. It’s really discouraging for the graduate students and undergraduates, who have been dreaming of a life as a mathematician, or maybe a math professor—a life of solving puzzles, asking questions, working with friends who love math too, thinking about our sublime, transcendently beautiful subject that is so misunderstood. Meanwhile, the wider public is confused. Don’t mathematicians want their problems to be solved?

Yes and no.

For “applied” mathematicians like me—ones who look outward and take inspiration from nature and the real world, and who hope to use math to help improve science, medicine, business, engineering, and everyday life—AI may prove to be a boon, the latest tool that lets us see further and deeper, in the tradition of the telescope and the microscope. So yes, absolutely, some of us are excited to use it.

But for many “pure” mathematicians—those who look inward at math’s most theoretical aspects, at its inner beauty and structure, using human creativity, imagination, and logic—AI feels more ambiguous because machines can discover the truths we’re seeking, at the cost of robbing us of the struggle and joy of discovering them ourselves.

Pure math is the study of ideal patterns and structures: numbers and shapes, waves and vibrations, order and chaos, symmetry and infinity. There are no perfect circles in nature, only in our minds. Except—and this is eerie—the truths of mathematics also seem to exist outside of human minds. They inhabit a mysterious Platonic realm, casting shadows on our reality.

Our species has been playing this game for at least 4,000 years. It’s as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature. If AI continues to bulldoze pure math, it’s going to crush the hopes of the young people who were dreaming of joining this tradition. [Continue reading…]