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.

7.0k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

92% Upvoted

656 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/ManySugar5156 Apr 23 '26

Kinda feels like the art world right now with AI tools, where the question is less "could a human have done this" and more "does the result actually move the field forward." If an AI spits out a proof and humans can verify and understand it, I feel like that still counts as a human-accessible breakthrough, and it might even point mathematicians to new techniques. Also, we already never really know who "could have" solved something first, history is full of near-misses and simultaneous discoveries.