Mathematician Strogatz 'Really Terrified' as AI Reshapes His Field
stevenstrogatz · x · 2026-09-13
Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz, coauthor of the upcoming Big Math, tears up talking about AI-driven breakthroughs in mathematics: "The science is thrilling, but there's a lot of human unpleasantness going with it."
- OpenAI said it used tens of thousands of agents to solve a 90-year-old, $1M-prize math problem (pending independent verification), building on work by Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa — but mathematician Tristan Buckmaster claims OpenAI rushed ahead after learning of his work with Anthropic's Levent Alpöge and tried to influence credit.
- Last week Anthropic said Claude proved 29,500 small theorems while formalizing an existing proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, a project other mathematicians had worked on for years.
- In August, OpenAI announced progress on 10 other long-standing math problems.
Strogatz sees the rupture as a symptom of corporate labs racing for headlines ahead of blockbuster IPOs, and of math slipping beyond human understanding.
Related event: Mathematician Steven Strogatz Explains His Tears Over AI Math Breakthroughs(8 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Security researcher: vibe coding will force software to consolidate around mature products — jd_pressman · 2026-10-31
- AI pushes circuit lower bound from 3.1n to 3.5n as UCLA-backed challenge aims at P vs NP — soumitrashukla9 · 2026-10-31
- What is work for? Cross-national survey of 8,234 adults on meaning in the AI age — soumitrashukla9 · 2026-10-31
- Which universities win top students may hinge on healthy AI-use boundaries, argues researcher — brianryhuang · 2026-10-31
- Researchers debate whether more inference compute can substitute for training compute — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-31
- Five agents can agree because they made the same mistake, krishnan warns with satire — krishnan · 2026-10-31