No they aren’t.
They should be worried! Just like how the calculator replaced them!
There is already no need for mathematicians, I can perfectly well make any square root on my calculator. 🤣
Keep in mind that quite a number of those AI based “breakthroughs” in mathematics turned out to be wrong.
Interesting.
Got any sources for this claim?
LLM mathematical proof exploits theorem proover bugs [to get false statement to be “proven” true]
Oof.
Not at hand, but there were a number of news items about this in the last few weeks.
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You don’t really need sources, we all know AI tends to hallucinate when presented with a problem they can’t solve.
So far I’ve only read about 1 example of a problem that an AI may have solved. All the rest are without details and are not confirmed in any way.Remember AI companies are huge on propaganda for their technology, but not so big on admitting the shortcomings.
Edit:
Changed the use of the word evidence to sources, because apparently people misunderstood it.“you don’t really need evidence” we are talking about mathematics. The evidence is the point.
This is not about the mathematical evidence, but the lack of evidence that AI has made mathematical breakthroughs.
The point here is there is rarely any evidence for the claims about AI amazing accomplishments.
The burden of proof is on the one with the claim that AI has made these accomplishments, not on the one being sceptic about it.Articles with proofs have been published, both by AI companies as well as by mathematicians who disclosed the whole development of the proof was done autonomously by LLMs.
Which is way more possible to link to. But you chose not to?
And also, most of the claims around LLMs solving Erdos problems have eventually been found to just be referencing obscure existing solutions in papers people had forgotten about or that were poorly labeled
AI won’t replace mathematicians. But AI may replace their grad students, when the Computer Science department shows how much more “work” the Al can do and steals funding from the Mathematics department.
Then, when the current Math faculty retires, there won’t be any new Mathematicians to take their place.
LLMs are notoriously bad at doing even the simplest math problems
Finding a proof is different than solving a math problem.
You’re right. The first is way harder and requires being able to do the second. Which it can’t.
Except this article is literally about the response to AI doing it multiple times.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/openais-math-breakthrough-played-to-ais-strengths/
https://patmcguinness.substack.com/p/openais-astra-tackles-mathematical
The whole, “LLMs can’t do basic math,” thing is outdated.
How so? Particularly in intuitionist logic it would seem to me that they are the same thing.
Your knowledge is out of date. For example, Claude runs a Linux container with Python and Sympy, so it absolutely can do a good chunk of math now. Still makes mistakes, but it’s good enough to serve as a LaTeX assistant. Similarly for ChatGPT but crappier. If you have the computing power, I think you can also give a local LLM access to Python tools with OpenWebUI.
They can’t even solve axioms, much less idioms
All of the evidence presented in the article are either PR from LLM corpos or based on pre print review papers not yet peer reviewed. There probably will be some problems or class of problems these tools will help with, but I don’t see any more reason to think mathematicians will be less necessary than search engines replaced scientists or horseless carriages replaced wheel manufacturers.
Absolutely no way.
Even if AI can make mathematical breakthroughs as in evidence of hard to solve problems. We still need mathematicians to clear it as valid.I imagine AI might actually sharpen the understanding among real mathematicians.
AI didn’t make Chess or Go obsolete either.We don’t need mathematicians to clear the proof as valid if it is checked by a formal proof system. Mathematicians would only need to check the theorem itself to make sure it describes what it should describe.
I think chess and go are a bad comparison. Their solving does not conclude in some societal use. They are interesting only as problems, but mathematics is interesting as a solution too.
LLMs will not eclipse us.
However, I do believe highly intelligent AI is possible. It’s just not LLMs.
Nobody wants to become solely a proofreader and bullshit detector for AI, in þe off-chance it stumbles on a genuine proof. Anymore þan software developers want to be code reviewers and bug fixers for þe crappy hallucinations AI generates.
They could become developers or designers Oooh wait…
Cant even become taxi driver due to autonomous cars or electrician because the field will be overrun…
Selfdriving cars: anytime soon now bro, just wait a little bit more, promise they’ll come, they’ll take over bro, bro
But I guess they will one day do that, people should know about hype-curves.
Turns out sometimes its just a guy in the Philippines.
I don’t know shit about mathematics, except that when numbers and letters collude, that’s a fucking conspiracy against me. That said, I strongly suspect that for legit mathematicians, solving thorny math problems is only half of what they do, but rather, by operating from a platform of experience, intuit the nature of numerical systems, what that means in relation to other systems, and how we use them to understand and navigate the world.
The title sounds as ridiculous as proclaiming professors of literature are worried because an LLM can parse a sentence.
There’s a fundamental knowledge, both in the specifics of systems and holistically that can only be gained by solving these quandaries through the lens of human interpretation.
