Mathematicians are grappling with the possibility that AI might eclipse them

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Mathematicians are grappling with the possibility that AI might eclipse them<br>I talked to 20 mathematicians about rapid AI progress in their field.

Kai Williams<br>Aug 04, 2026

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At a July 23 press conference in Philadelphia, the Canadian mathematician Jacob Tsimerman announced that he was joining the safety team at OpenAI. The timing was jarring: Tsimerman had just received a Fields Medal, perhaps math’s most prestigious prize.<br>“Because I have some publicity on me now,” he told me the next day, “I’m trying to direct people into AI safety as much as I can.”<br>Rapid AI progress hasn’t just made Tsimerman worried about AI safety; it’s also made him pessimistic about the future of mathematics as a profession.

Jacob Tsimerman. (Photo courtesy of the Simons Foundation. CC BY 4.0)<br>“I feel quite confident that very shortly AI will become robustly superhuman at what professional mathematicians currently do,” he told me. “I mostly want people to grapple with that reality.”<br>I had traveled to Philadelphia to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), the world’s most prestigious math conference, because I wanted to find out how mathematicians felt about the rapid pace of AI progress in their field.<br>Three years ago, leading AI models struggled with arithmetic. Last year they reached near-parity with the world’s top high schoolers in math competitions.<br>Now AI systems are autonomously solving open problems that stumped human mathematicians for decades:<br>In May, an internal OpenAI model disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, which Princeton mathematician Noga Alon described as “arguably the best known problem” in the mathematical subfield of discrete geometry.

In July, a mathematician working at Anthropic tweeted that Claude Fable had found a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture in higher dimensions.

On Saturday, OpenAI announced that an internal version of Astra, its next major model family, had “solved ten major open problems” — including several “of broad interest across mathematics as a whole.”

Developments like these have led some to claim that mathematics is close to being “solved” by AI systems.<br>How do mathematicians feel about this? I spoke with over 20 mathematicians in Philadelphia, ranging from prominent professors such as Tsimerman to incoming graduate students.<br>To my surprise, many were optimistic about the impact of AI on their own work, at least in the near future. A fair number said that AI systems had been helpful in their own research — albeit in limited ways — and seemed to expect that AI systems would continue to complement human talent rather than replace it.<br>And even those who thought AI systems might eventually get better than humans at all mathematical tasks bristled at the notion that math would then be “solved.” They argued that mathematics has a diverse array of goals and values, only some of which are about solving open problems. While AI can change which values humans should pursue, they argued, it does not change why humans might want to do math in the first place.<br>Sponsor message<br>Get career advice for having an impact in the age of AI from 80,000 Hours

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The traditional response to automation

Yu Deng, John Pardon, Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang sit onstage after receiving their Fields Medals in Philadelphia on July 23. (Photo by Erin Blewett/AFP via Getty Images)<br>That July 23 press conference featured mathematicians who had just won a Fields Medal or another prestigious math award at the ICM. A high school reporter asked each panelist what they would tell students anxious that AI systems might narrow their future place in mathematics.<br>Tsimerman said he wanted...