| The Dark Night of Mathematics(kirwinhampshire.substack.com) | |
| 201 points by rmdmphilosopher 20 hours ago | 245 comments | |
tl;dr: A mathematician expresses a profound spiritual crisis over recent LLMs producing counterexamples to long-standing conjectures, arguing that the community's coping responses (e.g., the Leiden Declaration) sidestep the real loss: mathematical discovery as a sacred, human experience of accessing the ineffable. The author contends that even if humans can still "do math" as spectators or curators, the creative act itself—historically a mystical tradition from Ramanujan to Grothendieck—is being permanently foreclosed. The piece offers no policy prescriptions, only a raw emotional plea for acknowledgment before the "coup de grâce." | |
HN Discussion:
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