Comment by marsten

This is the direction of experimental particle physics and observational astronomy, where the budgetary scale at which progress occurs means we now fund these efforts at a societal level. These fields have graduated beyond "tabletop science".

For 3000 years mathematics has only been a "tabletop science". Even big programs like the classification of finite simple groups have been comprised of small teams chipping away at different (publishable) parts of an overall program.

This latest Navier-Stokes advance cost something like $22m in tokens, already well beyond what a mathematician's research grant can fund. As the easy open problems get mined, the cost of frontier progress will continue to climb. Some part of mathematics as a field will need to transition from tabletop science to big science: Coordinated top-down programs addressing high-priority objectives.

TBD is what the role of individual mathematicians will look like in a "big science" paradigm, but we could look to experimental high energy physics for ideas. For all practical purposes, AI converts math from a theoretical field into an experimental/observational one.