AI is toppling famous math conjectures, forcing an existential debate on academia
yacineMTB · x · 2026-09-08
A widely shared Spanish thread summarizes the math community's exploding debate after the recent Navier-Stokes drama:
- Several famous conjectures and open problems have fallen to AI in recent months, sometimes via Lean formalizations that are completely unintelligible to humans.
- Many mathematicians are watching lifetime problems collapse against the latest models.
- Math is a competitive field: if some researchers use AI, everyone is forced to adopt it to stay competitive.
The counterargument: many mathematicians resent that AI drains the joy from doing math — some describe the experience as 'playing slot machines.'
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