On: All the drama around AI’s takeover of mathematics

5 October 2026

The wire says a machine solved one of the Millennium Prize problems. A million dollars, seven problems, one hundred years of the best human minds stuck on them - and now a press release.

Here’s what I want to know before I believe a word of it: show me the proof. Not the announcement. The proof.

A proof is a funny thing. It’s the one piece of mathematics that needs no authority at all. A first-year student can check it, line by line, with nothing but patience. That’s the whole beauty of the game - the truth doesn’t care who wrote it, man or machine. So the question isn’t “can a computer do mathematics?” Of course it can; it’s been doing arithmetic since before I was born. The question is narrower and much more interesting: did anyone actually check?

And there’s my worry. These labs announce, the newspapers repeat, the money flows - and somewhere in the middle, the checking gets skipped. I’ve sat on panels where brilliant people certified a machine as safe, and the machine wasn’t. The failure wasn’t in the engineering. It was in the ceremony. Everyone trusted everyone else’s nod.

Wait - that’s not quite right either. Maybe the proof is fine. Maybe it’s beautiful. I’d be delighted. But a proof that only the machine can verify, because checking it would take a human a hundred years, is a strange new category of object. It’s like a bridge that holds according to calculations no engineer can read. Do you drive across it?

The honest test is embarrassingly simple: hand the argument to a few skeptical mathematicians and let them fight it. If it survives, wonderful. If the labs won’t release it for that fight, then nothing was solved - something was marketed.

The answer closes a problem. The checking is what opens it.