Mathematician and author Steven Strogatz begins to cry when talking about the artificial intelligence-driven advances in his field over the past week. “Science is exciting,” says the Cornell University professor, “but it comes with a lot of human discomfort.” On Tuesday, OpenAI said it had used tens of thousands of agents to solve a 90-year-old math problem, which had a $1 million prize. The solution, which has yet to be independently verified, is based on a strategy developed by Spanish mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa. The announcement was marred by claims from another mathematician, Tristan Buckmaster, who says OpenAI rushed to solve the problem after learning of its work alongside anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge. Buckmaster claims OpenAI also tried to influence who got credit for the work. The breakup is a symptom of the rapid changes taking place in the field due to advances in AI and what Strogatz, co-author of Big Math, a book about how mathematics is moving away from human understanding to be published in November, describes as the race by corporate labs to grab headlines ahead of blockbuster IPOs. Last week, Anthropic said that Claude had proven 29,500 little theorems while formalizing an existing proof of Fermat’s infamous Last Theorem, a project other mathematicians had been working on for years. In August, OpenAI announced that it had made progress on 10 other long-standing mathematical problems. AI is making mathematical advances happen faster, Strogatz says, but what it means for experts who have dedicated their lives to the field is decidedly less clear. “I think the year 2026 will be remembered as an annus mirabilis or an annus horribilis for mathematics because so much has happened,” Strogatz tells WIRED, sitting in front of a wall covered in framed university honors. “You won’t be able to compete without AI in the future if you want to do innovative mathematics,” he adds. His collaborator on the book, Alex Townsend, has already been using technology to speed up his research. He recently used ChatGPT to help solve a decades-old numerical linear algebra problem. Toward the end of the interview, Townsend enters Strogatz’s penthouse. Townsend and his co-author said that without the technology, the volume of work required and the cost-reward ratio would have been unfeasibly high. But while AI has helped his work, it’s also changing the way Townsend views the field and his role in it. “In fact, I feel a little upset that I have dedicated 15 years of my life to mathematics research, and at a point in my career when I am very productive and at my maximum strength as a mathematician, that maximum ability no longer exists. Something is capable of surpassing me,” he says. “Before, it was very exciting because you’re world-class, you do great research, you push back the frontier of knowledge, and now I don’t feel like I’m the one on the frontier of knowledge. I’m the one with an AI agent, which actually feels very different. And I feel totally threatened by it.” For his part, Strogratz compares the current moment in mathematics to a horror movie, as AI, driven by systems that are not well understood, gets closer and closer. “But we’re not at the end of the movie yet,” Strogratz says. “Instinctively, I’m really terrified.” Here he reflects on what AI advances in 2026 will mean for mathematics, mathematicians and humanity. Their responses have been lightly edited for brevity. Photography: Sheryl Sinkow
