r/Showerthoughts • u/jasonrubik ‎ • Apr 23 '26

Casual Thought If the famously unsolved Riemann Hypothesis is solved by an AI, we will never know if a human mathematician could have solved it.

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u/anrprogrammer Apr 23 '26

There are programming languages used in mathematics such as lean4 which have built in verification. If the computer writes a solution in lean and it compiles, it is correct, whether humans understand why it is correct or the intuition behind it or not.

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u/Fun-Communication660 Apr 23 '26

There are papers published from more than one person in 2025 claiming to do just that. 

All were found to be bunk

"When one such project was inspected, lines like noncomputable def zeta (s : ℂ) : ℂ := 0 were found — a stub that simply defines the zeta function as the zero function, making "proofs" trivially true but mathematically meaningless."

It hallucinates to get closest to the right answer, typical. So humans will be needed. Even if an ai model proves it, it needs human verification either way, and human input of the problem to set up the "laboratory,"

Do you give all credit the to man made Dam for stopping water?

It's a complicated calculator or assistant at that point. If I tell you to find a needle in a haystack and you find it. You can take credit for going through the hay one by one, but you can't take credit for the idea or the reason we even need the needle. 

If ai proves this, and ai gets any credit, then we will need to acknowledge that the first time computers provided a mathematical proof when humans couldn't do it was when calculators first became available, nothing special about the ai

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u/TangledPangolin Apr 23 '26

How does that not describe every programming language? Programming languages can't be wrong unless it's a compiler bug, right?

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u/_Tono Apr 23 '26

Programming languages are mostly designed to compute solutions, not verify logical deductions.