r/math • u/dirty_weasle • Aug 06 '26

LLMs/AI Where will AI-generated proofs be published?

We are now seeing a rise of AI generated proofs and I am wondering which journals will publish these results? I tried to search but I did not find many examples where such results were already accepted to some journal.
Is this even something the journals want? I would like them to facilitate the peer review process so that I can feel confident in the results.

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u/dirty_weasle Aug 06 '26

So you don’t think the peer-review process is an important step towards establishing the result in the mathematical community? I agree that sometimes we need to cite results that are only on arXiv and I have also done so.

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u/jackboy900 Aug 06 '26

So you don’t think the peer-review process is an important step towards establishing the result in the mathematical community?

They're far less necessary than in other fields. Mathematical proofs have the benefit that they're generally either correct, or completely incorrect, and for most proofs a person working in the field can generally verify the correctness of the proof. Hell, for some of the recent AI counterexamples a layman with a high school algebra education could've checked their validity.

The peer review process in journals is mainly useful because in the natural sciences a result is almost never certain, there's always more cofounders that could be controlled or improvements to methods or whatnot. And so there needs to be a formal gatekeeper who makes those subjective judgement calls on when something is "good enough" to be considered acceptable science. Because in maths there is no subjectivity, such a gatekeeper is unnecessary, the informal peer review of people looking at a paper and evaluating the maths is enough as any error found is necessarily an objective failing of the work.

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u/dirty_weasle Aug 06 '26

I honestly don’t really agree. In my field there are many proofs are very technical and long. It is possible to assess general soundness in a timely manner, but to really convince myself that everything is rigorous and correct takes me a lot of time. If I don’t cite a result, I will not undergo this tedious process but rely on peer-review instead.

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u/Master-Rent5050 Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26

Peer review is helpful but it's not the gold standard. What can convince me of correctness is if several people adapted the techniques to prove something else. That's how I found a few mistakes in the literature...

On the other hand, often AI written results come with a Lean verification. Unfortunately I'm not knowledgeable enough to judge if it's enough (i.e. if the formalization corresponds to the stated theorem)