Clay Mathematics Institute Weighs In on the Navier-Stokes Problem

Smart move by them for waiting until the drama died down before making a completely neutral statement.

The statement is so sterile they don't even mention who solved it. The word "OpenAI" doesn't appear at all.

> Today, CMI shares in the excitement of the global mathematical community as we contemplate the announcement that the Navier-Stokes problem has apparently been settled. We hope to see waves of new human understanding unleashed as the innovations behind this work are analysed and interrogated.

That “apparently” feels load-bearing

sounds like they are providing notice that the clock has started on affirming the solution, that it IS presumptively solved, but that they are not commenting on the credit dispute nor the fields medalists open letter. seems appropriate.

It's worth mentioning that OpenAI will not be eligible for the Millennium Prize for quite a while. Per the rules listed https://www.claymath.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/millenni... , Clay Mathematics Institute have some requirements to make this process deliberately slow.

1) The solution must be published in a qualifying outlet, i.e. a peer-reviewed math journal. Publishing on your own website (which is what OpenAI did) or posting arXiv does not count.

2) At least two full years must pass after publication in a qualifying journal, before CMI will even consider evaluating it. The intent is to give the maths community time to scrutinize the solution.

Realistically, they'll be eligible for a prize ~2.5 years from now, or around 2029.

In my opinion, I think the Clay Mathematics Institute deserves some criticism for all the drama surrounding these problems. Mathematicians know that you can make problems arbitrarily complex, and declaring problems with large prizes attached to them can lead to a lot of competition and drama. I feel that mathematics should be free from competitions and the pursuit of glory.

However, after reading the open letter signed by 25 Fields Medalists, I became quite concerned. It feels like the mathematical world is changing very rapidly, almost overnight.

I used to think that before AI, you could spend your entire lifetime working on some of the hardest problems in mathematics. If you were an introvert or someone who enjoyed solitude, all you really needed was a pencil, some paper, and an eraser. You could spend years thinking about a problem, and if you were lucky enough to make a breakthrough, it would be your own journey.

Now AI is changing that. I wonder what this means for the kind of mathematics that people have traditionally done.

Mathematics has given us so many stories of lonely geniuses and their passions, people like Andrew Wiles, Grigori Perelman, and Yitang Zhang. Their stories are interesting because they show how deeply personal mathematics can be. They spent years working on problems because they were genuinely interested in them.

I am worried that we might slowly lose some of that side of mathematics as AI becomes more powerful. I do not think change is necessarily b […]

Proving things without comprehending them is a threat to intellectual work.

I am utterly fascinated by the amount of comments here from engineers that clearly have zero experience with mathematics making utter fool of themselves by claiming to know better than mathematicians what their jargon is/means, how publishing works/should work, etc…

I try not to go down the route of “hn was better before!” but… jeez, do better, people. What happened to this community, there used to be some effort to not be bottom-barrel like this.