Post #4202932

2026-07-29 15:22 UTC

a stock-slobber posts a cri de cœur about the coming automation of maths and HN says it’s no biggie, think how productive the field will become …substack.com/…/the-dark-night-of-mathematics news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048681 btw the language in the post is bad enough to be entirely human-generated For me, the affective quality of learning mathematics is empathetically tethered to an act of discovery and creation. Before you a channel through which humans have accessed the ineffable and sacred for thousands of years is being sealed for eternity.

Replies (2)

@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-07-29 15:39

how productive the field will become Let’s just ship all these people to Macroeconomica

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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-07-30 02:23

The blogger simultaneously elevates mathematics to some mystical endeavor and fixates on novel theorem proving as the key element of that and believes LLM-based AI will replace human mathematicians at theorem proving in a matter of years… that is quite a combination. I can imagine how 1.5 of those things fit together (although I disagree with that view point obviously), but the whole package is really quite an odd combination. Also, in the fantasy scenarios where AI really is capable of totally replacing mathematicians, aren’t we supposed to get post-scarcity abundance, freeing up your time to pursue mathematics out of pure desire for enlightenment? Maybe the blogger doesn’t believe that part? Or they are so attached to themselves personally getting to discover novel theorems first they don’t care that the post-scarcity era would on net free up a lot more people to pursue pure mathematics as a hobby.

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