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Amid OpenAI’s news that they’d solved the Navier-Stokes problem—verified w/ Lean—many mathematicians, including Quanta Books author Terence Tao (@teorth.bsky.social), worry that the rapid pace of AI proofs could short-circuit the main purpose of math: “to increase your understanding of a subject.”

Terry explores what it means to treat math not just as a collection of unsolved problems but as a way of thinking in his forthcoming book, SIX MATH ESSENTIALS, publishing October 27th. Preorder here: www.quantabooks.org/books/six-ma....

Lean has also become the go-to way to verify math—@anthropic.com shouted out @kevinhartnett.bsky.social's THE PROOF IN THE CODE while announcing how Claude formalized Fermat’s Last Theorem: www.anthropic.com/research/for.... Learn more about the history of Lean: www.quantabooks.org/books/the-pr...