It was therefore with some discomfort that a panel of elite mathematicians took to the stage Sept. 15 here at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, a conference that unites young researchers with award-winning mathematicians and computer scientists. The focus of the panel: to confront the rapid rise of AI, whose threat to their quiet discipline has thrust them into the limelight.
Then, on Sept. 8, OpenAI made the bombshell claim that it had deployed 10,000 AI agents to solve the Navier-Stokes existence-and-smoothness problem, one of seven fiendishly difficult Millennium Prize Problems posed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in the year 2000 (of which only one, the Poincaré conjecture, has been solved to the institute's satisfaction until now). The prize for solving any of these problems is $1 million.
It is in the bow wave of this news that the Heidelberg Laureate Forum panelists debated the controversy surrounding what the rise of AI means for the future of their discipline. Addressing the OpenAI announcement head-on from the outset was Michael Harris, a professor of mathematics at Columbia University.
Harris broke the OpenAI Navier-Stokes story on his Substack newsletter Silicon Reckoner, largely to reveal what he views as an important controversy relating to how OpenAI may have used Buckmaster and Alpöge's research.
Though this sentiment was shared by fellow panellist Geordie Williamson of the University of Sydney, 2026 Fields Medalist Jacob Tsimerman, a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto who in July joined OpenAI as an AI safety researcher, was keen to highlight the magnitude of the achievement by the company's internal AI model.
Tsimerman is highly focused on AI safety at OpenAI and his newly formed independent nonprofit, the Mathematical AI Safety Institute. He believes OpenAI's Navier-Stokes announcement represents a watershed moment in how mathematics is conducted, and by whom.
Peter Scholze, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany and a 2018 Fields Medalist, had a completely different perspective. Dismissing the OpenAI Navier-Stokes news as "some kind of PR," he stated that the point of the Millennium Prize Problems is not just to solve one math problem but to bring a fresh perspective to a host of related open questions in a way that builds human understanding — something that a long, machine-produced proof is unlikely to deliver.
RELATED STORIESMoreover, Scholze — who confessed to never having prompted a large language model and proudly showed off his "dumb phone" to the audience — said AI largely just accelerates mathematical progress, which is in his opinion of little value when it is already impossible to acquire a genuine understanding of all the progress that has been made.
But for all the panelists, the speed of change and advancement in AI means they cannot offer clear predictions of the impacts of these initiatives or what the field might look like in the future.
"To be honest, whenever anyone talks about 10 years from now, or even five years from now … it just seems unfathomably far away," Tsimerman said. "The world in two years is going to look so incredibly different than it does now."
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