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.
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. There were whispers and exchanged glances; Ono couldn’t make it through a single slide without a fresh wave of questions.
Another asked how Ono and his start-up would take responsibility in light of “the shameful way that AI companies are treating mathematics.” When Ono said that mathematicians would do their “very best” to avoid the bleak future the students were envisioning, a third retorted, hands trembling: “What are you doing? What is your ‘very best’?” The talk, including time for questions, had been allotted 50 minutes; with the extended Q&A, it went on for more than two hours. Many students lingered afterward, to vent and console one another.
To me, the reasons for these emotional reactions were obvious. The young mathematicians recognized that their field would have to change or risk extinction. What did surprise me was that when I returned to New York and brought it up in conversations with friends or family, they didn’t see what the problem was.
All sorts of amazing discoveries are around the corner, they imagined. These conversations exposed a long-standing problem: Many people don’t know what mathematics really is, or why mathematicians do it. Now mathematicians need to answer that question for themselves and explain it to the rest of the world — quickly.
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