Solving Math’s Greatest Problems Was an Art Form. Then Came AI

From Suno composing uncanny elevator music to Tilly Norwood delivering customer-service-inflected one-liners, artificial intelligence has rattled creative industries. You can add math to the list after OpenAI said that, using thousands of agents, it had solved a decades-old puzzle known as the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem.

“The artists and the musicians have already gone through this,” says Juspreet Singh Sandhu, a mathematician at Colorado State University.

Despite what timed high school exams might have you believe, mathematicians aren’t focused on getting the right answer as fast as possible. In fact, contrary to math’s image as a practical subject, the development of new mathematical ideas often resembles artistic exploration, akin to inventing a game or puzzle. Mathematicians typically follow a thoughtful, deliberate process to develop their ideas. In contrast, OpenAI approached the proof with brute force, which shortcut the process in a way that threatens to undermine human understanding.

“A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns,” wrote the English mathematician G. H. Hardy in his 1940 essay, A Mathematician’s Apology. As Hardy describes it, a painter uses shapes and colors, and a poet uses words, while a mathematician constructs patterns out of ideas.

A pacifist, Hardy wrote the essay during World War II to argue that people should pursue mathematics for its own sake, separate from applications, particularly wartime ones. His essay promotes “useless” mathematics. He cites famed mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss’ oft-quoted statement about number theory, the subfield of math which involves the study of integers, as the epitome of beautiful, useless math. While Hardy’s comparison of math to art holds up, he would turn out to be wrong on some of the specifics: After being useless for centuries, number theory would prove valuable for encryption protocols widely used today to secure your emails and bank accounts.