Ben Antieau guest post on Terence Tao's blog: mathematics needs both 'fast math' and 'slow math' in the LLM era
littmath · x · 2026-09-16
At Terence Tao's invitation, mathematician Ben Antieau published a guest essay, Fast math / slow math, addressing the unease rippling through the math community about LLMs.
Key points:
- The fear is fundamentally economic: LLMs produce statements and proofs, and mathematicians worry about obsolescence, students' jobs, and funding.
- His answer: mathematics is not the collection of true statements and cannot be "solved" any more than human experience can.
- Borrowing the slow food movement as an analogy, he advocates both modes: LLM-accelerated "fast math" alongside the months-long personal understanding, the thrill of the chase, and mentoring — "slow math."
- He splits mathematical work into gaining knowledge, creating knowledge, and transmitting meta-knowledge, with the last being hardest to automate.
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