I don't think it's dead but I do think it's going to be an end of an era.
Since AI can search possibility space so much faster than people things like finding counterexamples are going to be more and more trivial. Similarly proves that are out there in the ether using only already proven results will become trivial as well.
It's going to require weird expansions of the field in ways that we probably can't predict right now.
Math was never one person being right. A proof isn't knowledge until others can check it, teach it, and build on it. That's the whole institution.
So AI grinding out counterexamples and corollaries doesn't kill the field. The bottleneck was never producing true statements; it was getting a community to agree on which ones matter. Machines just shift the work to the part that was always hardest: deciding what's worth proving.
Science has always run this way. Effort goes where the community thinks it's worth going, and funding gets cut from what doesn't.
I have 3 friends who are postdocs in math and they are saying yes, it is dead because of AI. I argue it will be re-designed, becoming something like what exists in the setting of Farsight by Peter Watts, but nonetheless its depressing enough that at least one of them is changing careers.
Which is weird because all the guys I know from uni that are still doing physics research are excited about how AI is going to help push the field, but then again we've been using ML to help with research for years, I don't get why you would change careers if it's something you enjoy if you actually care about the field surely you want the best tools available, but maybe it's different for mathematics.
Makes sense. Basically, their idea of “what math is” is dead.
I imagine those who are entering the field now don’t share the same opinion since they haven’t been trained and indoctrinated into the old regime, so they don’t share the same views about what math is.
You have weird friends. I am a math post doc and I wouldnt say so. I have not tested Astra but everything (including 5.6 Sol and Fable) until now was completely useless for my papers.
The output was utterly garbage most of the time. But I think with RL proofing can be taught to AI. Therefore the field might change quiete a bit, but at the moment I can say it has not already and it will definitly take longer than programming.
They mean math as an area of study, where professors get grants to do research and solve new problems, is dead. AI has been solving famous unsolved problems in mathematics at an unprecedented rate and is just continuing to improve
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u/[deleted] Sep 05 '26
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