June 26, 2026
It won’t surprise the people who know me that I find a lot of my personal self worth and enjoyment in mathematics. It’s something I was good at, occasionally still am good at, and find ineffably satisfying. This was not always the case. Frankly, until rather late in highschool, my interest in math was simply in service of doing well in school, with a half cocked aspiration of eventually becoming an engineer or physicist or some such. Then I took a course on mathematical proofs and a course on abstract algebra. I began to read books on my own in real analysis (shout out Tao and Baby Rudin) and weirder things like “naive” Lie theory (Stillwell’s book is genuinely delightful). And it was like a whole world opened up for me, I felt smart, sure, but even more so I felt like I was digging into to something immense and exciting. It was fun!
And it seems like this is mostly dead or dying now-kind of. I’d like to propose that it might be possible for this sort of fun to stay alive, although it will be different and it will mean pursuing a life with a fundamentally different direction than the one promised or expected. There are two streams right now-one is the mathematician as mathematician. They sit down and learn and discover, mostly alone even when in company. The other is the mathematician as interlocutor-I can’t say prompt engineer without vomitting in my mouth a little bit, but yeah, at the end of the day, that’s what I mean. The first stream is drying up, the second will be around for a little bit longer (maybe forever, but actually it’s looking like some sort of a-g-eye may crawl out of the bulwark, in which case buh bye second stream). Anyways-this isn’t (mostly) about the second stream, we’re going to either figure that out or we won’t. This is about keeping some bit of the first stream running even as the second takes preeminence. For this to happen you need to realign two things,
1) research no longer means producing papers-the ai can do that for you-it means finding something that is genuinely exciting and investigating it intensely but away from the ai. This harkens back to learning math for the first time as a young person, there’s an implicit assumption that everything is already well trodden territory, but this doesn’t stop you from writing things down in a note book for yourself, sharing thoughts with friends, being excited by something that is NEW TO YOU. You can still come up with things, but make sure to really own them and actually care. There’s minimal prestige or economic incetive now, so stop wasting time on doing for the sake of doing.
2) Your social network is more important that ever, because it is here and here alone that the joy and fun of math is preserved. If math is a massive collaborative art project, then it needs collaborators. For it to stay art, though, taste is essential. The first stream, now a trickle, needs to be segregated rigorously from the first, which will drown it out given the chance.