About whether current LLM architectures can produce interesting new mathematics.
Has this happened?
Yes 64 (51%)Not sure 29 (23%)No 32 (26%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether current LLM architectures can produce interesting new mathematics.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Atiyah is truly one of the giants of modern mathematics. I remember long ago I struggled through a reading course of his and Bott's Yang-Mills paper in graduate school. Like many great works of math it too had that paradoxical characteristic of transforming seemingly 'non-mathematics' into mathematics* by reversing the usual direction of application of one to the other, in this case, from physics to math. It would start a whole movement that'll produce much of modern geometries greatest hits like Donaldson's (his student) theorem in 4 manifolds to Witten's great papers.
* A reason I think modern LLM architecture as they currently stand with their underlying attention mechanisms will not produce interesting new mathematics. A few other ideas are going to be needed.