Comment by czgov
2 hours ago
I am ABD in mathematics. That was a long time ago. I taught math for many years at a community college. My amateurish but knowledgeable perspective is that these developments shatter the mystique for me.
What AI is showing is that mathematics is mostly just pattern searching and AI can do this far better, faster, and with a much wider base than humans can. When I was working on my thesis problem I realized that I worked much less than my fellow students. I was an average student in my program but even for the best students they had to spend a lot of time thinking about stuff. They put in a lot of effort.
Is the difference between me and Tao mostly effort and that he has a much better memory of mathematical facts than me?
This is only the "problem solving" side of mathematics. Completely missing the theory builders who have completely reshaped the world of mathematics (and far beyond). AI is a long way from matching original thinkers of the calibre of Euclid, Al-Khwarizmi, Newton, Leibniz, Euler, Galois, Riemann, Cantor, Hilbert, and Grothendieck. Or Turing, Gödel and Von Neumann?
According to Tao and Gowers there are AI results that did proofs in clever ways. That’s one way new theories come about.