I didn’t expect the math vs AI debate to blow up as it has. Until very recently, math has always been a niche subject, even compared to physics. Hardly any cared about it online, although there would be the occasional viral post on “how to self-learn math,” which always circled to the same advice of “read a lot of books and do many problem sets”. The top two math Reddit subs r/mathematics or r/math would go weeks before the entire front pages were replaced with new posts; now it’s one or two days, thanks to AI.
I remember from early 2023, after Elon bought Twitter and renamed it “X,” to early 2026, there was hardly any discussion on X about math, aside from the occasional post about training models or in the context of machine learning. Even when news was announced of OpenAI models scoring well on Olympiad benchmarks, it didn’t generate anything close to the debate seen now. The assumption was that models would always fall short of actual mathematicians. That all changed in the Summer of 2026 with a key development: an AI-assisted disproof of the Jacobian conjecture, which had resisted resolution for nearly 90 years. Then everything exploded.
Without taking sides, the benefits of AI are clear. AI has made it much easier to learn math. Gone are the days of problem sets and expensive books. You can just either ask the AI to create a curriculum or “learn as you go”. As someone who “does math,” I think I am qualified to offer my assessment. Math has become so difficult and specialized that you’re forced to use AI to be competitive. AI can do what no human can, reasoning through huge search spaces and making non-obvious connections.
An agent can expedite what would otherwise be months of calculations. I can give the AI an idea, and it performs a full literature review, assessing the feasibility, novelty, or even attempt to solve my idea or problem outright. There is nothing even comparable to it at this point. If you’re not using it, you’re at a huge disadvantage to those who are. It’s analogous to taking steroids in professional bodybuilding.
The mathematicians themselves know this. I think this is why their opinions have been tepid, calling for moderation rather than outright banning AI. AI is here to stay; people are going to be using it, so this calls for moderation in the sense of having a debate about how math, as a profession, has to evolve. This is the nuance that is lost online. They are not acting out of selfishness to protect their jobs, but rather to figure out how the “profession of math” goes forward.
The future of math is it will be more like fine art. Journals will act as galleries. Math as a profession will exist, but it will be harder to make it a career when anyone with some background knowledge and a pro Astra or Opus subscription can “fire up” new results: compose a prompt, and at the press of a button, new math is produced. Professional mathematicians will be competing with amateurs and labs with access to computing power. And this means more supply, and consequently, important results possibly being overlooked and higher journal rejection rates.
What I mean is: despite AI, math taste still exists, much like taste in art. There’s a category I call “slopmaticians”: people who use AI to produce math that’s technical but uninteresting, doesn’t really engage with the literature, or is poorly motivated, aimed at a very narrow audience. This kind of math is dense in calculation and may interest a few people, but it will almost never make it onto arXiv, let alone into a journal. Institutional filters still exist to keep this on the outside, just as they always did in the pre-AI era.
So, similar to Uber obsoleting the medallion cartel and allowing anyone to earn revenue driving part time, AI helps democratize math. But at the same time, I still see hierarchies (e.g. academia, journals) persisting.
As for criticism, math has always occupied a position above reproach. Other professions are constantly subjected to criticism. Law is associated with ambulance chasers. Sales is associated with scams or deception. Healthcare is associated with quackery. There are entire categories of jokes about lawyers and doctors. Politics is associated with corruption. Tech executives are constantly blamed for everything wrong with society, such as teen mental health problems, social media addiction, or even subverting democracy itself. For physics, even string theorists have come under criticism for their ideas being “untestable”.
Math places undue weight on competition, assigning worth to a result by how many people have failed to solve a problem rather than by other aspects of the mathematics itself. I think this is a valid criticism. The popularity of AI, by those mathematicians, shows the lengths taken to be competitive, even it means outsourcing by the actual process of doing math to a machine, or not understanding the results well enough to appraise their accuracy. Bitter disputes over priority and credit, such as concerns about “prompt theft,” resemble legal battles over copyright infringement. In that sense, mathematics is less about proving results, but rather proving who “owns” a result.
Few are above this. Just as teens may be addicted to smartphones, academia is addicted to credit. Producing papers is a lot of work, jobs are few and far between, and people rightfully or justifiably want to be acknowledged for that effort.
But imagine if mathematicians were not allowed to take credit for results: each paper would be published under a new alias, similar to randomly generated 4chan usernames. (This sorta actually happened.) Things like tenure would stop working, because how does a university award a promotion to a pseudonym? Output would certainly fall, but at the same time, the true mathematicians, who do it for love of math and not credit would remain.
Overall, I see the merging of math with AI as a net positive. I predict math as an institution will survive AI without making significant concessions. Hierarchies and signifiers of status such as journals and tenure will continue. But I don’t think math is above criticism, and it’s not an example of anti-intellectualism to do so. Just as the “taxi monopoly” was disrupted by the much better Uber, maybe math needs a similar change or upgrade, which AI provides.