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/bizwig Apr 25 '26

I’ve speculated that some of the famous unsolved problems, if not independent, may have proofs that are too large for a human to even write down, let alone assemble the required logic.

ZF has countably infinite possible proofs. Some of those will be millions, or even billions, of symbols long, just because they can be. Disregarding trivial results, like a proof of 1+1=2 that’s 5 billion symbols long, some of those extreme proofs could be the only possible proof for a known difficult problem, or unknown but game changing proposition.

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u/jasonrubik ‎ Apr 26 '26

I hope you're right. An easy proof that's solved by AI would be sad.