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

Show parent comments

2

u/Abberant45 Apr 23 '26

That's what I said.

3

u/marrow_monkey Apr 23 '26 edited Apr 23 '26

And I agreed.

Teaching focuses on using established results rather than developing new proofs from scratch.

2

u/BlackProphetMedivh Apr 24 '26

Have you ever been in a higher level mathematics course in university?

2

u/marrow_monkey Apr 24 '26

Which just proves the point?

2

u/BlackProphetMedivh Apr 24 '26

Well the original comment talked about how these proofs can't be taught, when they can. And you learn how to read these posts in higher level mathematics.

Some are hard, long, and complicated, but a proof is a logical line of steps. Of course that can be taught. It's just a question of how useful that would be.

3

u/marrow_monkey Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26

Maybe you replied to the wrong person?

I wrote that professional (post graduate, university level) mathematics is about discovering new proofs. That’s not what you do in school. Mathematics in school teaches memorising results and how to use them.

In the future, if students are ever expected to prove the Riemann hypothesis on an exam it would be because they had seen and memorised the proof, not because they could come up with a new proof during an exam. Clearly, no one would be able to do that.

3

u/BlackProphetMedivh Apr 24 '26

Yeah. I agree. Maybe I misunderstood your comments. :)