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  arjie
  Really enjoyable read. I escaped a career in Mathematics by being sufficiently bad at it that I only have a Masters. Fortunately, I escaped to a field immune to AI: CS and then a software engineering career. Well, not really, but I did get a good 15 years out of it so thank god for that.About half of my friends are founders of various startups and the rest are executives of and almost all of them have the view that it’s better for everything to be a failure than to be in the “it could make it” category for half a decade or more.In that way, I am glad I found that it wasn’t for me. I had the curiosity, but not the doggedness to face difficulty (not enough curiosity perhaps?) or the ability to not encounter such difficulty. And fortunately that meant I was never in the “I could make it” category. God bless clear and present boundaries and may the devil take the grey zone.
• dmix
  This author has a natural talent for writing. That was interesting throughout.
• randusername
  > We're all frustration addicts. We just want to bang our heads against problems we don't yet know how to solve.I've been tapering off AI lately. I think I've realized that conquering the struggle is the fun part, and accomplishments just don't hit the same if AI is smoothing over every friction and cordoning off all the pitfalls and rabbit-holes.
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  ventana
  It's interesting that this piece stands well enough if you replace mathematics with probably any other intellectual profession, including software development or pretty much anything else. And, I lie to anyone who asks me why I’m a mathematician. It is much easier to claim “I love learning the laws of life,” while literally handwaving, than it is for me to flashback to the twenty or so pivotal moments that lead to me walking out of Gainesville with a PhD in Arithmetic Geometry. Since “normal” people mostly don't understand what the software development job is about, handwaving in response to regular questions: “what do you do at work?”, “what do you like about your job?” – is pretty normal. I think that most of us have some prepared answers ready to use. Mathematics is the thing you try to understand, don’t, get frustrated about, and then do. Just like the software development. I truly believe that the only people who can survive a software job are those who can tolerate the constant feeling of frustration caused by things not working or breaking for random reasons, and persevere in this environment to do the things you need to do.
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  derangedHorse
  > My physicist friend once asked me what the point of doing research was if someone like Terence Tao could have figured out everything in my dissertation in a tenth of the time. I answered by pointing out that Terence Tao didn’t. Terence Tao did not find a small open problem posited by my advisor and publish a bite sized result making incremental progress. He has only so much time and so many other fish to fry.This reminds me of a post I saw recently, although I can't remember the platform. It said something along the lines of assessing the limits of AI by finding the dumbest questions it can't solve. I think that pairs well as an additional way to view meaning through one's work.The linked post points out constrained attention as a way to bring meaning to novel work that no one else took on. With AI, this can still be applied to compute.I'm just wondering if there are a class of problems that humans, at least in the short-term, where humans need to be in the loop to solve more efficiently.
• arunix
  Related: Does one have to be a genius to do maths?https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...
• asdf_snar
  An incredibly enjoyable read, with a distinct voice.
• karmakurtisaani
  That was well-written and interesting, thanks!
• Vgoose
  I wish I could write this well. What an enjoyable read.
• cammasmith
  Really enjoyed reading your perspective. I am a recent math PhD graduate, and I also find it both exciting and terrifying to see what AI is doing to the field of math.
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  emil-lp
  > Lying is a core part of communicating mathematics. We lie to kindergarteners when explaining fractions. We lie to fourth graders when approaching limits...Hard disagree.Lying is with intention to deceive.Teaching is simplifying with the intention that they understand and get the correct intuition.Math is not about lying, that's just silly.
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  aslprt
  These AI ads are getting better and better by the day.
• throwaway_7274
  Dear Garvy. You and your writing are wonderful. Sincerely, someone.
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  underlipton
  That was long-winded, but I appreciate that it seems to have actually been written by a human being. For every landmark theory, theorem, or conjecture, there have been incremental, partial results supporting intuition and inching towards the white whale. When I attended BARD, a small computational number theory conference, one of the organizers preached of the outsized impact we could have just by being willing to program the numerical experiments that other mathematicians only theorized about. The small ball player can completely change the approach and intuition of the leading names without ever joining their ranks. The mediocre mathematician has always had purpose. Yes, yes, YES! F*cking yes.The greatest challenge of the AI Age (which is also the Climate Change Age and the Demographic Trap Age and a lot of other ages) is going to be finding an appreciation of the mediocre and mundane, when so many things are going very right, and so many things are going very wrong. Most of the time, the top of the bell and an SD in either direction can overwhelm either end, for better or worse. So respect for the unremarkable is warranted, if you want good things to happen and bad things not to.
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  hyperhello
  Hobbies aren’t as fun when you have an overbearing friend who constantly shows off how much more they know and how quickly they can switch to talking about anything you want but in greater depth than you.
• skavi
  [flagged]
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  bhouston
  I have some bad news for the non-mediocre mathematics. Given it another year or two or so and there won't be much need for non-mediocre mathematics either. Instead everyone will have on call a near magic mathematician who can push the state of the art for their needs.Math is actually a perfect fit for AI because it is possible to express everything in terms of written language and you can write formal verifications of things. It is just a set of abstract rules, perfect for a computer.And remember computer science was initially a sub-discipline of mathematics. So after Claude/Codex conquer writing code, it makes sense to move on to mathematics.