Many "serious" mathematicians are aghast

wryoak

tl;dr for everyone: disrupt the conservative academic establishment* *unspoken or unintended consequence being so that the oligarchy can seize the authority of intellectual credibility

mb7733

Which serious mathematicians? There is a quotation about peer review. I'm assuming that's also made up.

tptacek

This was especially funny to watch during the Jacobian Conjecture announcement, where people on HN were waiting for "Lean proofs" and corroboration from other mathematicians for... a published counterexample to the Conjecture.

vatsachak

I need to make the same post when someone finally RLs an LLM to get really good at performance engineering. Many "serious" performance engineers are aghast "Nooo the r00b0t can't make llvm faster and not tell us how!!! it has to make a commit to the open source!!!" "Ha, that's peer review and politics"

josefritzishere

LLMs are bad at math of course. You can't calculate non-deterministically and expect accuracy. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/07/ai-leaps-from...

firasd

This is a response to a strawman... I think we'd want to see what an actual mathematician says to sensibly analyze this discourse I do think that there are two things going on that explains the past couple weeks' breakthroughs: 1) A lot of conjectures are weakly grounded. 2) Maybe humans are biased towards proving conjectures rather than finding counter-examples (prestige in finding proofs, tedium in searching for contradictions, etc.) 3) Math is one of the rare fields that can be 'solved' in pure token space without needing empirical or subjective-opinion support

scrapcode

> So it is possible, for example, for a teenager to become known as an obsessive proof-checker even though that teenager has no formal credentials. Hard to cry this as a benefit after locking papers down behind a costly wall for decades.

luckystarr

If these proofs were output by the AI in a format readable by a proof verification system, the verification step of publishing vanishes. Then it's only valuable to check if the stated intention actually matches the proof and isn't something completely different.

raincole

AI would dramatically increase the demand of gatekeeping.

angry_octet

This is Lemire so take it with a big grain of salt. Some notable mathematicians including Fields medalists are not 'aghast'.

noncoml

Mathematicians having their stackoverflow moment.

nicf

I worked as a research mathematician for a while, and I've published peer-reviewed math papers. Reading this tweet put me in the strange position of feeling like defending the way peer review works in my (former) field, which I'm not used to doing. Among other problems it goes too slowly, it pays only the participants who provide the least value, and it was designed for a world that hasn't existed for a long time. But this tweet paints a somewhat misleading picture of the role peer review plays in practice in modern math research. Reading this tweet could leave you with the impression that when someone proves a new result, no one pays any attention until it's gone through peer review and published in a journal. This just isn't true. ArXiv preprints are much more widely read than the journals' version of articles, and they go up essentially as soon as they're written. Certainly no one's waiting the year-plus it would take to get the article published in a journal! And even before that, mathematicians communicate their results to each other through slightly less formal channels, like blogs, conference talks, and regular human word of mouth. In short, despite the sclerotic and parasitic nature of the journal system, the way ideas get disseminated in the field in practice is actually a lot closer to the ideal prewar picture he's describing in the tweet. I'm led to understand that this was less true before the Internet, but even by the time I started my PhD in 2009 things had been working the way I just described for quite a while.

Daddiri

I have been respectfully following Lemire for more than 15 years but he got a bit weird after COVID-19. Although his arguments are not completely wrong, he fails to mention the large impact of what he is saying. Yes, peer review is not good but it's been one of the best tools we have. We can swap the peer review with democracy and elections, and got almost same arguments. That's why this is giving me an ick.

handle584

>> The current peer-review model, I should remind you, is a recent invention from the second half of the twentieth century. What? In EU Crelle's Journal is founded in 1826, while in the US the American Journal of Mathematics in 1878.

fmajid

We don't have to imagine his scenario, that's what happened to Évariste Galois. But then again any university professor gets dozens of crank letters a year claiming to have solved the trisection of angles or such.