Comment by pcfwik

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Comment by pcfwik

> When I was in mathematics, reading other people's work was always more rewarding to me than doing my own. [...] I really welcome the omniscient mathematician machine people are predicting.

Curious, as someone who relates strongly with both the OP and your first sentence: did it matter that you were reading "other people's work?" Or was it simply the satisfaction of understanding an answer?

Personally, one of the things that finally drew me to math as an undergrad (vs. high school where I thought of it as a stupid competition played by people who cared too much about showing off their smarts) was an instructor who helped me think of studying math as a conversation with a fellow human being many miles, centuries, languages, and cultures removed from me. Despite that distance, my mind was appreciating a creation that another human had cared for and poured years of their life into. There was a sort of romance to it, like the feeling of butterflies-in-the-stomach we get from seeing a multi-thousand-year-old cave painting, yet even more impressive because of the depth of the thought communicated.

I personally haven't been able to recreate that feeling from computer-generated math. Whenever I try to, I feel deeply uncomfortable (somewhat similar to the thought of eschewing human connection for an 'AI companion').

I'm more optimistic than the OP, especially when I think of new discoveries in healthcare. And I know there's enough "organic human-created math" from the last ~2k years that folks who feel the way I do can spend the rest of our lives studying only that. But it is sad to think that this multi-thousand-year project of "communicating human mathematical creations through time" has just ... ended? Or seems to be ending soon? Or at least greatly cheapened from a romantic dream into a sort of fun hobby, like recreational knitting? I can't help but share the OP's sadness that something seems to have been lost for future generations. Though a lot has been (and will be) gained as well, for sure!

Replies pcfwik · 2026-07-26
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