When does math become recreational for people?
In poker?
What does the end of mathematics look like?
31–40 of 94 posts
Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Writing like a wanker isn't funny.
Why not just say to yourself, - "I don't think that's funny" - instead of generalizing on behalf of others with a word that is in essence, meaningless or rather, it means what you personally want it to mean for any particular occasion?
The account is 9 years old and has 166 karma. I presume it's an alt account used for less acceptable opinions.
Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?
#33Considering that mathematics is, at its core, a language for defining relationships between quantities, and then relationships between those relationships, so on and so forth, I think it's fair to assume that the possible number of such relationships are infinite. Some of these relationships will obviously be useful in the real world, but they don't always have to be. I too, suspect that we can keep on building theor…
> I think it's fair to assume that the possible number of such relationships are infinite
That’s easily proven to be true. “Two plus two equals four” is a theorem, so is “three plus three equals six”, etc.
Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?
#34This article is written in an unnecessarily extravagant style, IMO. Also, I appreciate anonymity, but, to my point > I live by myself in a remote mountain cave beyond the ken of civilised persons, and can only be contacted during a full moon, using certain arcane rites that are too horrible to speak of. Okay.
As always, HN has no sense of humour...
Humor is banned here.
Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would an AI confirmation or rejection be more convincing than the proof itself?
Presumably an AI would formalise the proof in a system such as Lean, then you only need to trust the kernel of that proof system. Rejecting a proof would be more complicated, because while for confirming a proof you only need to check that the main statement in the formalisation matches that of the conjecture, showing that a proof has been rejected requires knowledge of the proof itself (in general).
> requires knowledge of the proof itself (in general)
Why? If a proof is wrong it has to be locally invalid, i.e. draw some inference which is invalid according to rules of logic. Of course the antecedent could have been defined pages earlier, but in and of itself the error must be local, right?
Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?
#36This article is written in an unnecessarily extravagant style, IMO. Also, I appreciate anonymity, but, to my point > I live by myself in a remote mountain cave beyond the ken of civilised persons, and can only be contacted during a full moon, using certain arcane rites that are too horrible to speak of. Okay.
As always, HN has no sense of humour...
I don't think the commenter was saying anything about the quality of humor in that statement. Rather, they were attempting to relay that the style of writing is overly verbose, even on the contact page. Also, isn't the parent comment attempting to be humorous as well?
Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?
#37I love the language of this article :-)... it may be florid, but that's quintessentially human.
About the substance, I agree that there are fair grounds for concern, and it's not just about mathematics.
The best case scenario is rejection and prohibition of uses of AI that fundamentally threaten human autonomy. It is theoretically possible to do so, but since capital and power are pro-AI[^1], getting there requires a social revolution that upends the current world order. Even if one were to happen, the results wouldn't last for too long. Unless said revolution were so utterly radical that would set us in a return trajectory to the middle ages (I have something of the sort published somewhere, check my profile!).
I'm an optimist when it comes to the enabling power of AI for a select few. But I'm a pessimist otherwise: if the richest nation on Earth can't educate its citizens, what hope is there that humans will be able to supervise and control AI for long? Given our current trajectory, if nothing changes, we are set for civilization catastrophe.
[^1]: Replacing expensive human labor is the most powerful modern economic incentive I know of. Money wants, money gets.
Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?
#38The camera didn't kill painting. Neither the bicycle nor the motor-car killed running. There are already subfields of mathematics where it's believed that all the interesting discoveries have been found and no-one is looking except for the occasional amateur - and other subfields where to even have a hope of doing cutting edge research you would need to both do multiple years of postgraduate study and then get accepted onto one of a small number of close-knit teams that are pushing that cutting edge on an industrial scale.
So I don't see any reason to worry about the impact of AI. Unlike most fields with AI worries, mathematical research isn't even a significant employment area, and people with jobs doing it could almost certainly be doing something else for more money.
Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The man is south african, we are geologically blessed and have a lot of pleasant remote mountain caves =)
Okay, I will revert everything. The cave, the moon, and the rituals are all real. It's impressive how much reality is based on location :-)
That's the spirit!
Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?
#40The camera didn't kill painting. Neither the bicycle nor the motor-car killed running. There are already subfields of mathematics where it's believed that all the interesting discoveries have been found and no-one is looking except for the occasional amateur - and other subfields where to even have a hope of doing cutting edge research you would need to both do multiple years of postgraduate study and then get accept…
> The camera didn't kill painting
But it did. Painter used to be a trade where you could sell your painting skills as, well, a skill applicable for other than purely aesthetic reasons, simply because there were no other ways to document the world around you. It just isn't anymore because of cameras. Professional oil portrait painter isn't a career in 2025.