Comment by doctorpangloss

This is meant to be a funny, stylized comment. If you can't bother to read to the end, just ask a chatbot to explain it to you.

Most people do not use any math after school in their lives. All of their real problems are political. Kids spend significant time in school being told that math teaches them "problem solving" and then leave school and discover, since math solves no political problems, math doesn't solve problems at all. In other places around the world, where by many measures people are much more numerate than Americans, people are actually poorer and live under more authoritarian governments. In industry, math has been reduced to a shibboleth for a neurodivergent lack of ethics, which is why mathematics PhDs go into banking, and never politics - and we imagine politicians and lawyers to lack ethics, which is pure projection, nearly all of our best presidents and congressmen were lawyers. Even the academic environment that supports mathematicians and the STEM community generally - all of that concentrated neurodivergence and lack of people skills has led to less political power, which means less funding and less new students, which has been much more threatening to mathematics than automated proofs.

I love math, but my honest POV is, the value of theoretical math cannot get much lower. The crisis is insurmountable. The community made its deal with the devil (Jim Simons) long ago, it thought it was a STEM discipline like bio and it's really a philanthropic humanities discipline like opera. Math is having its opera moment. Someone would have to step up as the rich person who saves math, and unfortunately, all the best candidates are right now destroying it with chatbots.