Casey Noon

Well, Casey, get out your TI-83 graphing calculator because today we're going to talk about math.

Can I play snake on it or do we actually have to talk?

No, we have to talk because today we are going to talk about what is going on with AI and math.

Now, this is a subject that we have talked about before on this show, but there's actually been a lot happening just over the past couple of weeks.

So two weeks ago on May 20th, OpenAI announced that one of their models had reached this big mathematical milestone.

Basically, it had disproved this longstanding geometry conjecture by identifying a new way of thinking about this famous math problem, one of these Erdos problems that basically no human mathematician had considered before.

That was considered a very big deal in the world of mathematics.

And at the same time, there is also this backlash brewing in mathematics to the use of AI.

Just this week, a group of mathematicians have been passing around and signing something called the Leiden Declaration.

which is basically an open letter about the use of AI in mathematics from people who are concerned that maybe they're sort of eroding the human foundations of this academic mathematical discipline.

Which model did you use to look that up?

I'll tell you later.

So we just thought it was a really good idea to check in on the state of AI and math and to help us make sense of what is going on right now.

We have turned to one of the best guests I can imagine for this subject.

Kevin Hartnett is a journalist.

He has covered math and computer science for many publications, including most recently as a senior reporter for Quanta magazine.

He's also the author of a book that comes out next week called The Proof in the Code, which is sort of about this formal math language called Lean and how it's transforming math and AI.

Today, he works as the editorial lead at Cursor, the AI coding platform.

And I just thought he would have a really good view of this situation.

Also, we just like to bring on people named Kevin because they tend to be really smart.