Tom Ritchford
1 min readApr 12, 2023

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A strong and somewhat sad article. I mostly agree.

There is one feature you missed though: it's the fact that we seem to be getting toward the "end of mathematics".

When I studied math in university, I could read and understand many of the great papers that had come out in the previous twenty years.

But now, mathematics is in the strange position where there are at least three papers out there by well-respected mathematicians that might prove very important results, but we are unable to validate them because there are simply no other mathematicians who can understand the work.

And if these get evaluated, there will be harder problems after that.

Will computers help? Not really - what good is it if a computer emits a proof that no one can understand and claims that something is true? It's not really mathematics, having to take a result on trust, and it won't inspire young people to study math.

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