jboggan

Aha, thank you, this makes more sense now.

I started typing out some specifics and realized it was honestly too weird and lascivious to describe in an HN comment section, shoot me an email and I'll send you the blog post about it. 2002 was wild in Budapest.

I'm probably the 1,000,000th ranked contemporary mathematician and I matter a great deal to the human species.

I would be more excited if the proof doesn't hold up because a) it would be the best and most complicated hallucination to date b) I could still solve the problem myself and c) I still learned some weird new counting methods.

Ah, cool. I'm still learning Lean - is there somewhere else in the repo with the Lean specification of the cycle construction for the full argument?

Thank you!

Igenis!

I would love to know the true unsubsidized cost of all of this. How many grad student-years did this cost?

Indeed!

I've been mentoring (or so I'd like to think) a very bright undergraduate mathematician, in fact he was the one who pointed out the final irreducible flaw in my proof last summer. And I am extremely curious to see what he does and if he even finishes his degree in mathematics. He had already expressed to me some dismay that his summer undergrad research program with several Ivy-league math majors got blown out of the water by a few hours of a frontier model. It's making everyone question what the future will look like and what education and training and certification will even look like.

But the future belongs to those who show up. Maybe this is the beginning of a mass democratization of scientific and math research, maybe we are going back to the gentleman-scholar model of amateur researchers and Twitter will be the new Journal of the Royal Society.

Thanks. I think AI is going to be a net benefit for people like me who have a surplus of ideas and too few hours to explore them. I may actually restart my graduate thesis research using AI, I did a survey of what has happened in the field since I left and about half of what I was working on back then has since been discovered and published by others, but there are some really interesting threads to pursue now that modern datasets are so much richer (this was computational biology research).

You may achieve far more than you plan on and it may come years and years after you think it should happen. You probably haven't met the right problem yet. You will.

Link? I need to show up and claim my reddit gold.

I think this is going to come down to personal philosophy and religion. And having a strong grounding in history to help us all through whatever changes we are rapidly living through.

I think the next test will be asking an AI to come up with a new branch of mathematics - just letting it rip and telling it to construct a system that doesn't reduce to combinatorics, group theory, graph theory, analysis, etc. Just get wild with it and don't start with any known problem as a jumping off point.

I think something like the Collatz conjecture will be solvable not as number theory or ergodic theory but some other completely wacky environment that humans haven't even sniffed at.

Right. And I'm kicking myself for not having the mathematical breadth to know about them.

Oh man, we should talk. I have been working on a patent with ChatGPT specifically to get around two complementary patents that are now together because of a corporate merger this year. I am not sure how much longer anything is going to be patentable with this kind of design assistance available to everyone.

Also, once upon a time I wanted to be a patent lawyer. It's incredibly hard to sit for the patent bar if you have a pure math degree and don't have an engineering degree. Thankfully New Hampshire lets anyone sit for the FE exam.

Look, I quit Google a decade ago and tried to make a ChatGPT-lite LLM in my living room (turns out 2017 and GTX1080ti era was a shade too early). I knew that this technology was eventually going to revolutionize programming and mathematics and everything else. I am still flummoxed on a daily basis watching it transpire.

But also I am excited to be living through this new era of programming and new era of mathematics. I'm still saddened that I couldn't be the one to solve this old problem, but now I realize that my personal approaches were really solving a level of this problem even stronger than the original conjecture, and I'm energized to tackle those (in my free time between being a solo founder and father of 3, etc.).