[Ads-l] Candidate for melancholy quotation of the year

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

The capabilities of top AI models have been advancing rapidly in the
field of mathematics. An internal OpenAI model recently disproved the
Erdos Unit Distance Conjecture. Anthropic's Fable 5 found a
counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture.

AxiomProver achieved a perfect score on the 2026 International
Mathematical Olympiad. AxiomProver's solutions were fully formalized
in Lean. AI systems are now capable of fully formalizing lengthy and
intricate proofs. For example, the AI system Gauss formalized Maryna
Viazo's proof of optimal 24-dimensional sphere packing.

Canadian mathematician Jacob Tsimerman has commented on the recent
developments in AI. Tsimerman's remark below is my candidate for
melancholy quotation of the year.

[Begin quotation]
I think it’s going to make being a mathematician not a profession
anymore. I don’t think mathematics is unique in that.
[End quotation]

Tsimerman is about to be awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor
in mathematics, according to a leak from the website of the
International Congress of Mathematicians.

Here is a longer excerpt from the Tsimerman interview published in the
Notices of the American Mathematical Society (issue date August 2026):

https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202607/noti3372/noti3372.html

[Begin excerpt]
I think there's a lot of "cope" going on among mathematicians, and a
lot of overconfidence about the limitations of AI. It seems like most
people are looking at the fact that LLMs are not currently as good as
mathematicians at math and concluding for various reasons that it
can’t be and never will be as good. Or they're assuming that it will
only be like an assistant, where it proves the simple lemmas, but that
it won’t prove the major stuff. And I basically think that that’s all
incorrect.

I think it’s going to make being a mathematician not a profession
anymore. I don’t think mathematics is unique in that. I do think it
might come sooner in math than in other places. Because math is much
fewer soft skills; it’s much easier to train yourself. Once you have
Lean and the LLMs integrated you can just go — go experiment, learn,
prove stuff.
[End excerpt]

Tsimerman used the word "cope" with an internet-slang sense which I
discussed in a previous post. Personally, I think the profession of
mathematician will continue, but it will change dramatically during
the coming years.

Garson

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