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 Strogatz Explains His Tears Over AI Math Breakthroughs(5 posts)→
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