I’m reminded of that famous debate between Poincaré and Hilbert at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900. It was then that everyone decided to follow Hilbert’s path, and proof came to be valued more than intuition. I think modern math at school and at applied university kind of lost this intuitive part. I try to teach my students that mathematics is, first and foremost, a very precise language of communication. It’s sometimes amusing to ask those who don’t like math to do without it entirely, just to see how much harder it becomes to describe the things around them. Second thing I tell them, formulas are the essence of mechanisms in their purest form. And in this form, they’re much easier to grasp and mentally manipulate. It always amused me, after taking a mechanics course, to imagine that for any formula, you could visualize a mechanism or process that implements it. And third thing, I suppose, the ability to verify one’s own statements as proof. Although, of course, mathematicians would probably tear me apart here for my heresy:sorry, I’m not a mathematician, but an engineer. You can make mistakes by using incorrect assumptions, but at some point, analysis itself will show you that you were mistaken. There’s a wonderful book, How to Prove It by Daniel Velleman, which provides an introduction to proof for the uninitiated like me. I really enjoyed it.
People often hate math because it was not explained to them correctly, usually by people who are good mathematicians but know close to nothing about teaching.
It was so infuriating to see everyone in the class absolutely fail on a specific subject and the "teacher" assumed that everyone must be stupid then. No self reflection, no questioning himself why he is not getting gaussian distribution in marks, just straight Fs.
While I understand and emphatically with Tao's concern I'm afraid it's missing the forest from the trees. Unless you can make a claim that AI will never be able to perform intellectually at the same level as any human at a much lower cost, there's an outstanding utility problem that remains unaddressed.
Sure enough, the AI may not have taste or goals, or many human traits, but that's irrelevant to the much thornier (and much broader than mathematics or even academia) question related to who's getting paid how much and for what.
I enjoy learning math from LLM proofs with the help of LLMs https://github.com/htzh/flt_for_human . It is amazing how well models do when they are well grounded by formalized proof traces (even if created by other models).
I'd be interested in hearing a field report on this! For example, I can easily imagine that they're great at walking through the proof step by step, explaining background as necessary; but as TFA notes, one of the most important questions is "why is this definition the way it is?", and my bet would be that the Lean is not enough to help the LLMs meaningfully in answering that.
Even if we can proof/disproof any statement in Math (not possible due to halting problem), Human still need to decide which statement to be called "theorem".
The theorem thing is invented by human to help other people better understand Math structure in a easier way.
It's interesting because, as far as I'm aware, the vast majority of people already believe that math is more than proof. A slightly smaller but still very large majority don't even include proofs in their mental concept of what math involves.
The people building AI claim it will surpass human intelligence in all
respects and prerhaps kill
us all. Should we just cease all human activity on the basis of what AI might do in future?
Personally, I doubt AI can surpass a good human explainer because explanation requires empathy, which benefits from being an instance of the kind of entity you are explaining the thing to. That gives you a way of exploring and evaluating the space of possible explanations that isn't available to an LLM.
It starts to sound like medieval science - "understanding" instead of proofs. And like a medieval army loosing a battle in the open field tries to retreat back into the fortress, people, facing the prospects of machine doing intelligent tasks better than humans, start to retreat into areas like intuition which supposedly aren't reachable by the machine. Some go even further starting to talk about religion. It is very Hegelian that the crown jewel achievement of our civilization starts to drive people away from the foundational principles of that civilization.
Basing science on proof (or anyway believing that you can) is Logical Positivism, a mindset that opposes the method of falsifiability. But of course mathematics is all about proof, and for that reason I was wary of it for a very long time.
I’m reminded of that famous debate between Poincaré and Hilbert at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900. It was then that everyone decided to follow Hilbert’s path, and proof came to be valued more than intuition. I think modern math at school and at applied university kind of lost this intuitive part. I try to teach my students that mathematics is, first and foremost, a very precise language of communication. It’s sometimes amusing to ask those who don’t like math to do without it entirely, just to see how much harder it becomes to describe the things around them. Second thing I tell them, formulas are the essence of mechanisms in their purest form. And in this form, they’re much easier to grasp and mentally manipulate. It always amused me, after taking a mechanics course, to imagine that for any formula, you could visualize a mechanism or process that implements it. And third thing, I suppose, the ability to verify one’s own statements as proof. Although, of course, mathematicians would probably tear me apart here for my heresy:sorry, I’m not a mathematician, but an engineer. You can make mistakes by using incorrect assumptions, but at some point, analysis itself will show you that you were mistaken. There’s a wonderful book, How to Prove It by Daniel Velleman, which provides an introduction to proof for the uninitiated like me. I really enjoyed it.
People often hate math because it was not explained to them correctly, usually by people who are good mathematicians but know close to nothing about teaching.
It was so infuriating to see everyone in the class absolutely fail on a specific subject and the "teacher" assumed that everyone must be stupid then. No self reflection, no questioning himself why he is not getting gaussian distribution in marks, just straight Fs.
This goes in a necessary direction, from my personal take away of Gower's recent post on the subject.
Mathematics is suffering from Goodhart's Law:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Doing something difficult was a signal that you:
a- understood it and all the background information it requires
b- internalized techniques and methods that are helpful in problem solving in general
Now it just means nothing
While I understand and emphatically with Tao's concern I'm afraid it's missing the forest from the trees. Unless you can make a claim that AI will never be able to perform intellectually at the same level as any human at a much lower cost, there's an outstanding utility problem that remains unaddressed. Sure enough, the AI may not have taste or goals, or many human traits, but that's irrelevant to the much thornier (and much broader than mathematics or even academia) question related to who's getting paid how much and for what.
I enjoy learning math from LLM proofs with the help of LLMs https://github.com/htzh/flt_for_human . It is amazing how well models do when they are well grounded by formalized proof traces (even if created by other models).
I'd be interested in hearing a field report on this! For example, I can easily imagine that they're great at walking through the proof step by step, explaining background as necessary; but as TFA notes, one of the most important questions is "why is this definition the way it is?", and my bet would be that the Lean is not enough to help the LLMs meaningfully in answering that.
Even if we can proof/disproof any statement in Math (not possible due to halting problem), Human still need to decide which statement to be called "theorem".
The theorem thing is invented by human to help other people better understand Math structure in a easier way.
Interesting headline.
It's interesting because, as far as I'm aware, the vast majority of people already believe that math is more than proof. A slightly smaller but still very large majority don't even include proofs in their mental concept of what math involves.
> don't even include proofs in their mental concept of what math involves
Technically, the largest majority are the people who go: "What are proofs?" :P
Jacob Tsimerman claims [1] we might have superhuman expositors by April, so then what?
[1] https://youtu.be/H7_d_sgui6o?t=4436 (timestamped url)
The people building AI claim it will surpass human intelligence in all respects and prerhaps kill us all. Should we just cease all human activity on the basis of what AI might do in future?
Personally, I doubt AI can surpass a good human explainer because explanation requires empathy, which benefits from being an instance of the kind of entity you are explaining the thing to. That gives you a way of exploring and evaluating the space of possible explanations that isn't available to an LLM.
It's all good until we have superhuman appreciators :)
It starts to sound like medieval science - "understanding" instead of proofs. And like a medieval army loosing a battle in the open field tries to retreat back into the fortress, people, facing the prospects of machine doing intelligent tasks better than humans, start to retreat into areas like intuition which supposedly aren't reachable by the machine. Some go even further starting to talk about religion. It is very Hegelian that the crown jewel achievement of our civilization starts to drive people away from the foundational principles of that civilization.
Basing science on proof (or anyway believing that you can) is Logical Positivism, a mindset that opposes the method of falsifiability. But of course mathematics is all about proof, and for that reason I was wary of it for a very long time.
>Basing science on proof (or anyway believing that you can) is Logical Positivism, a mindset that opposes the method of falsifiability
not really. You can consider positive proof as an experiment confirming your theory and the negative proof as an experiment falsifying your theory.