Mathematician: OpenAI's Navier-Stokes proof is a once-in-a-century contribution; human understanding will now lag machine proofs
tszzl · x · 2026-09-13
Mathematician Scott Armstrong pushes back on skepticism about OpenAI's Navier-Stokes blow-up construction, calling it a huge contribution: PDE analysts will need weeks to a month to digest it, and once someone rewrites it accessibly, human understanding of these equations will break the bottleneck stuck since Leray 100 years ago.
He highlights the real paradigm shift: proofs used to emerge after human understanding, but from now on machines will typically write the proofs first, with human understanding following closely behind. The quoted tweet meanwhile mocks the discourse that treats "listing all known truths without explanations" as the bar for AI in math — like a professor declaring the class will skip explanations entirely.
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