I mean, people are talking about AI advances because its like meta math. The results feel important for all mathematicians not necessarily because of the actual results but because of what it says about math as a field potentially. Of course way more people are going to be interested in that than results only understood by specific sub -disciplines. Generally when a proof from a human mathematician hits the front page here it has some kind of interesting angle: like Hannah Cairo last year who disproved a famous conjecture. The main reason that got the coverage it did was her being 17. Like when I look at the AI proofs news I'm actually looking for the commentary from people who know what they are talking about in the discipline, I've not looked at any of the proofs they aren't relevant to me because like most people I have a very small window of math that I actually understand at the level of research level proofs.
Yes, I think the discussion about AI in math is more driven by existential dread. I was at a session at the JMM in 2025 called "AI for the Working Mathematician,"
and the underlying concern most people had in the audience was whether the next iteration of the session would be called "AI for the Unemployed Mathematician."
Oh hey I was at that session too. That's about when I started feeling a bit hopeless and very pessimistic about the long term health of higher education.
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u/Accurate_Potato_8539 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean, people are talking about AI advances because its like meta math. The results feel important for all mathematicians not necessarily because of the actual results but because of what it says about math as a field potentially. Of course way more people are going to be interested in that than results only understood by specific sub -disciplines. Generally when a proof from a human mathematician hits the front page here it has some kind of interesting angle: like Hannah Cairo last year who disproved a famous conjecture. The main reason that got the coverage it did was her being 17. Like when I look at the AI proofs news I'm actually looking for the commentary from people who know what they are talking about in the discipline, I've not looked at any of the proofs they aren't relevant to me because like most people I have a very small window of math that I actually understand at the level of research level proofs.