Mathematicians are facing the sudden shift with grief, anger, and a desperate search for fresh ideas: “If we don’t adapt, there’s just no more math in 50 years.”

Throughout the summer of 2026, there were plenty of signs of what was to come. Every week, it seemed, artificial intelligence models were offering proofs of decades-old mathematical conjectures. So what happened on September 8 shouldn’t have been a complete surprise. And yet to many it felt sudden, almost violent. OpenAI announced that its models had solved one of math’s most famous problems — and immediately sparked a controversy over authorship and standards. Mathematics would never be the same.

“In whatever years I have left, I don’t expect that I’ll ever again prove a theorem because I’m actually needed to prove it,” Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas, Austin wrote on his blog. “Human mathematicians are forevermore dethroned as the main theorem-proving entities on planet earth.” Other online missives expressed optimism, but many revealed some combination of grief, confusion, and fear.

Two days after the announcement, I found myself in a classroom at the University of California, Berkeley, surrounded by some 150 students, postdocs, and professors. The mathematician Ken Ono, who left academia for an AI start-up called Axiom Math, was scheduled to give a talk. “You might be graduating into a profession that might not even exist, or that will be very different than what you expected,” Ono told them. “You need to brace.”

...read more at quantamagazine.org