Lawrence Weschler and Chaim Goodman-Strauss at Wondercabinet:
We’ve regularly kept in touch with Goodman-Strauss, late of the University of Arkansas and more recently mathematician-in-residence at the National Museum of Mathematics here in New York City (as well as a longtime collaborator with the late John Conway of “Game of Life” fame)—never more so than in recent weeks when Open AI claimed to deploy 10,000 autonomous LLM agents to produce a proof of the Navier-Stokes conjecture regarding the behavior of fluids, one of the six outstanding million-dollar-prize Millenium Problems (a controversial assertion, as things developed, when a human mathematician at NYU claimed to have shared his own breakthrough work on the problem with Open AI just a few days earlier)—and then, just a few weeks after that, roiled the mathematical world yet further by releasing 372 other proofs in a single afternoon, several of those epochal in their own right, thereby seemingly tanking the career-paths of hundreds of graduate students and tenure-tracked professors, not to speak of throwing the entire discipline into a near-apocalyptic identity crisis. In the meantime, a mere civilian named Ioannis Tsiokos had produced a significant proof of his own, formulating a single 3-D polygonal solid capable of likewise filling an infinite volume aperiodically, merely by having carefully directed a standard chatbot to solve the problem for him which it proceded lickety-split to do, generating not only the shape (a sort of sofa-chair) but also a 60-page proof.
more here.
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