Insufficient collaboration and funding for solving complex mathematical problems

Signals over time

2 observed signals across 1 sources, tracked for 8 days. Confidence: low.

What people are saying Observed

• “Nearly everyone rejected the idea of a CERN-like project for mathematics when it was recently proposed. It should have been more seriously considered. Now that things are settling a bit after the Navier-Stokes and theorem-dump shocks, something like what mathematics will look like post-AI is starting to emerge. Of course, things should be conditioned on the assumption that capabilities will continue to improve, but imagine something like this-- An institute with a tremendous amount of compute, either rented or owned, built on the Humboldtian model of the unity of teaching and research. The main draw for big names would be the access to compute, free of the fear of being scooped. New forms of attribution and collaboration would develop, and we'd gain some clarity for students and PhDs on what a future career looks like. The current melange of math university departments all following their own paths through the crisis without consolidating resources makes the transition more difficult. Think of the path physics took beginning with scattered cyclotrons (the basement of the Niels Bohr institute was even dug out to put one in), then the larger labs that followed. That transition w”

  Hacker News · frustration

• “I am pretty sure there's a lot of professional human work behind those proofs. It is not only a matter of the labs having a deep pocket for unlimited tokens, but also deep pockets to build a team of mathematicians and engineers around it for pure marketing purposes. A lot of those problems probably remained unsolved for so long, because frankly, there's no much money to be made directly out of them. You can't patent a proof. Thus, progress on each problem was restricted to the efforts of isolated researchers across the world that most of time didn't know each other and that would only communicate through papers and the occasional conference, or maybe a conversation here and there in a forum. But, should any of those problems became a small manhattan project with a team of mathematicians working in the same institution, talking to each other every day, and with unlimited computational resources, I bet a lot of them wouldn't have remain unsolved for so long. Of course, LLMs can speed up a lot of work, even find unexpected relationships between previously published work that remained overlooked until now, but let's make no mistakes, a lot of this is the r”

  Hacker News · frustration