Martin Beraja: AI's Navier–Stokes proof inverts math's usual knowledge order
JMateosGarcia · x · 2026-09-14
Economist Martin Beraja comments on the AI proof of Navier–Stokes and the mathematicians' letter. For most of history, prescriptive know-how ran ahead of propositional understanding (citing Mokyr): medicine healed and engines ran before anyone could explain why. Math was always the exception—propositional first, prescriptive later—and the AI proof of NV inverts that order.
He argues this isn't necessarily bad: thermodynamics was invented after the steam engine. But for machine-delivered results to diffuse and be built upon, propositional knowledge will now have to be reverse-engineered from what machines hand us—which he reads as the real point of the mathematicians' letter.
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