In the field of applied mathematics, the long, human process of trial and error — not just the solutions themselves — is often what has led to progress, Cornell mathematics professors Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend write in a New York Times op-ed.
“This year, artificial intelligence models have been mowing down open problems in mathematics, one after another, with brutal efficiency. The carnage escalated in early September, when OpenAI unleashed 10,000 agents on the Navier-Stokes problem, cracking it in just 88 hours. Just yesterday, the company announced that the same internal model had now ‘resolved more than 100 longstanding problems across most areas of mathematics’ — results that OpenAI was waiting to release until it had figured out ‘the best way to inform the community of the rapid progress to prepare and adapt the field,’” Strogatz and Townsend write in the piece. “Some mathematicians, however, are now drawing a line: To ‘adapt the field,’ they believe, could hollow it out.”
Read the article in the New York Times.
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