Steven Strogatz is one of the mathematicians I most enjoy following on X. He has a remarkable ability to communicate the beauty of mathematics, to make even difficult ideas feel accessible and deeply human. Which is why his increasingly somber reflections on artificial intelligence have caught my attention.
In September, OpenAI announced that a system of roughly 10,000 AI agents had produced a solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Problem in just 88 hours. The claim is still being scrutinized, but the broader transformation is undeniable. Machines are beginning to solve mathematical problems that have resisted some of the brightest human minds for decades.
For Strogatz, this has been an emotionally difficult development. In a recent interview with The Daily, he described the prevailing mood among mathematicians as grief. At times, he admitted, he had been moved to tears. And then he said something that, to me, captured the heart of the matter: "We like to think of ourselves as heroes, and maybe that's over."
I found that remark both moving and revealing.
I can understand the emotion. What I struggle to understand is the conclusion that something essential about mathematics, or about being human, is being lost.
If a machine discovers a beautiful mathematical truth that no human being could find, why should that make me sad? Why shouldn't it fill me with wonder?
I suspect the answer has less to do with mathematics than with a much older human problem: our tendency to confuse the value of an experience with the status it gives us.
The meaning we give things
I don't believe life comes with an intrinsic, universal meaning waiting to be discovered. Meaning is something we create through the way we experience the world, through the things we care about, and through the relationships we develop with them.
This is not a pessimistic view of existence. Quite the opposite. It means the significance of what we do does not depend on some external authority declaring it significant.
And it certainly does not depend on being better at it than everyone else.
Think about how strange the alternative would be. If the meaning of an activity depended on our relative ability to perform it, almost everything we enjoy would become meaningless. There will always be someone who plays the piano better than we do, understands physics more deeply, or writes more beautifully. Yet this knowledge rarely prevents us from enjoying music, thinking about physics, or reading a novel.
Why should mathematics be different?
The fact that another intelligence can do something better than I can does not, by itself, diminish the meaning that activity has for me.
It only does so if I have made superiority part of the meaning.
Mathematics as an aesthetic experience
For me, mathematics is much closer to art than to competition.
I enjoy looking at a beautiful proof in much the same way that I enjoy listening to a piece of music, examining a painting, or standing before a magnificent landscape. There is a peculiar pleasure in understanding something that initially seemed mysterious.
You struggle with a problem. You try one approach, then another. You notice a connection that wasn't obvious before. Suddenly, something clicks. What once appeared complicated becomes almost inevitable, and you wonder how you could have missed it.
That moment of understanding is profoundly satisfying.
And its beauty has nothing to do with whether I am the first person to experience it.
Consider a student who spends an afternoon proving a theorem that has been known for three hundred years. The student has contributed nothing new to the collective body of mathematical knowledge. The proof already exists. Thousands of people may have understood it before.
But the experience of discovery is entirely real to that student.
The moment of insight is not borrowed or diminished because it has occurred in other minds. The understanding is new to the person experiencing it, and that is enough.
I sometimes think of a person climbing a mountain. The existence of a helicopter that can reach the summit in minutes does not invalidate the pleasure of the climb. The point was never merely to arrive at a particular altitude. It was to experience the climb itself.
Mathematics is like that for me. I don't love it because I am exceptionally good at it, let alone because I am the best. I love the experience of figuring things out.
The pleasure of understanding is not a reward for being superior. It is a reward for understanding.
The ego in the room
Of course, not everyone relates to mathematics, or to intellectual work more generally, in quite the same way.
For some people, being a mathematician is not merely about enjoying mathematics. It is also about being recognized as someone capable of doing what others cannot.
There is a powerful psychological reward in being exceptional. We like being admired for our intelligence, our originality, our ability to solve problems that leave others bewildered. And when we become sufficiently good at something, that ability can become central to our identity.
We stop merely enjoying what we do. We begin to define ourselves by how well we do it relative to others.
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with wanting recognition. We are social creatures, and the respect of others matters to us. Nor is the desire to make an original discovery necessarily an expression of vanity. There is something genuinely special about being the first person to see something no one has seen before.
But a problem arises when the value of our work becomes inseparable from the admiration it brings us.
Then, somewhere in the background, a different question begins to shape our relationship with the things we supposedly love:
What's in it for me?
What does being good at this give me? What kind of status does it confer? How does it distinguish me from everyone else?
If the pleasure I derive from mathematics comes partly from occupying a privileged position in an intellectual hierarchy, then artificial intelligence really is a threat. A machine that can solve problems I cannot solve undermines the very distinction on which some of my self-worth may depend.
Yesterday, I could imagine myself among the most capable mathematical minds in the world. Tomorrow, I might be hopelessly outperformed by a machine.
That can feel like a personal demotion.
But notice what has actually changed.
The mathematical objects have not become less interesting. The theorems have not become less beautiful. The experience of following an elegant argument has not become less satisfying.
What has changed is my place in the hierarchy.
This, I think, is what makes Strogatz's remark so revealing: "We like to think of ourselves as heroes, and maybe that's over." A hero, in this conception, is someone who accomplishes what others cannot. Heroism requires distinction. It requires being special.
And if a machine can do everything I can do, only better, it becomes difficult to sustain that particular image of myself.
But perhaps what is disappearing is not the meaning of mathematics.
Perhaps it is a certain flattering story we have been telling ourselves about our place in it.
What is genuinely at stake
But questioning this sense of loss is not the same as dismissing every concern about AI's impact on mathematics.
The concerns are real.
Mathematical research is not simply a collection of answers waiting to be produced. It is a human practice built around curiosity, conversations, false starts, intuition, teaching, and the gradual development of shared understanding. A proof generated by a machine does not automatically become something people understand.
And there are institutional consequences. If machines can produce major mathematical results at extraordinary speed, what happens to graduate students? How do young mathematicians build careers? Who receives credit, research funding, and recognition? What happens to the culture of collaborative discovery?
These are serious questions, and they deserve serious answers.
There is also a genuine loss in no longer being able to discover certain things first. I would not pretend otherwise. The thrill of original discovery is different from the pleasure of learning something already known, and it would be foolish to insist that one perfectly replaces the other.
But none of this establishes that mathematics itself becomes less meaningful.
It establishes that the institutions and ambitions we have built around mathematics may need to change.
We should not confuse the loss of an exclusive human privilege with the loss of the value of the activity itself.
And we should be especially careful not to confuse the pleasure of doing mathematics with the pleasure of being an important mathematician.
Those are two different things, even if they often coexist in the same person.
More beauty, not less
There is something almost paradoxical about the current moment.
In May, an OpenAI model disproved a longstanding conjecture associated with Paul Erdős's unit-distance problem. The argument drew on a surprising connection between discrete geometry and algebraic number theory. Mathematicians examined it, verified the result, and found genuine mathematical elegance in the approach.
Strogatz himself spoke admiringly of the proof's beauty and ingenuity.
That, to me, is the more interesting part of the story.
A new piece of beautiful mathematics had entered the world. An unexpected connection had been revealed. Something that had been obscure was now available for human beings to study, understand, and appreciate.
Why should the fact that a machine discovered it make the result any less wonderful?
When I listen to a magnificent piece of music, I don't feel diminished by the composer's talent. When I see a beautiful painting, I don't resent the painter for having created something I couldn't create myself.
I am grateful that the work exists.
The same applies to mathematics.
If AI can discover structures, relationships, and ideas that no human mathematician would ever have found, I see that as an extraordinary expansion of what there is for us to understand.
Perhaps some of those discoveries will initially be beyond our comprehension. That presents a new intellectual challenge: to translate them into ideas we can grasp, to understand why they are true, and to find the deeper principles hidden within them.
There may come a time when machines are vastly better than humans at proving theorems, just as calculators are better than humans at arithmetic. But being outperformed does not imply being excluded from understanding.
And even if a machine has already solved a problem, nothing prevents me from sitting down with a pencil and paper and experiencing the pleasure of solving it for myself.
The insight still happens in my mind.
The beauty is still there for me to see.
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