Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz tears up on camera over AI's rapid math breakthroughs
stevenstrogatz · x · 2026-09-15
Cornell mathematician and science writer Steven Strogatz broke down in tears during a WIRED interview about AI's recent strides in mathematics, then posted a thread trying to explain why.
- Triggers: OpenAI claimed a major advance on the century-old Navier-Stokes-adjacent problem using tens of thousands of agents; Anthropic's Claude completed 29,500 micro-theorems while formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem.
- He calls 2026 either mathematics' "annus mirabilis" or an "annus horribilis" upending scholars' livelihoods.
- His co-author Alex Townsend, despite recently solving a decades-old numerical linear algebra problem with AI, feels displaced: "the frontier is now AI agents — you're just an operator."
- OpenAI's Navier-Stokes claim also sparked priority disputes: NYU's Tristan Buckmaster and others had published closely related results, and commercial labs racing for headlines before IPOs taint pure science with capital competition.
Related event: OpenAI Claims 10,000 Agents Solved Navier-Stokes Problem in 88 Hours(11 posts)→
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