A Mathematician Reads the AI Future
My field is as much an expression of the human spirit as music and literature. Is it for the machines now?
!Image 1: Illustration of a black-hole spiral with math symbols falling into it.
Illustration by Tina Zhou / The Atlantic
October 25, 2026
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I t’s 4:26 a.m., and I’m walking around the house while my wife sleeps upstairs. I’m feeling disoriented and discombobulated, just as I have for months, since May, when AI came for math.
The leaves are ablaze here in Ithaca, fiery reds and oranges, and I saw them swirling around in my backyard yesterday, following the streamlines of an eddy described by the Navier-Stokes equations. You’ve heard of Navier-Stokes, right? By now you must have—in early September, OpenAI claimed to have solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. An internal AI model unleashed about 10,000 agents that ran for 88 hours straight and gnawed on the old problem until it yielded.
I am a math professor, and my field is in crisis. Nobody in math is ever going to forget the year 2026. Unless this is really the end of the subject, and then nobody will remember anything about math anyway. Well, the machines will remember. But for them, this is something like day one.