Canonization and the Overhang

David Bessis’s “The fall of the theorem economy” is ostensibly about LLMs and the pursuit of pure math, and I found it fascinating in its own right, even while I’m not qualified to evaluate a number of his claims. Worth stopping and reading on its own. Additionally he names a couple of key trends that will be familiar to any engineering leader in this moment, and gives us two very useful terms. “The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves.” — Bill Thurston Bessis makes the argument that mathematics has publicly been valuing proving theorems as the high status work, while systematically undervaluing and disguising the critical roles that creativity, community, clarity, and teaching play in advancing the field. Critical work got done without anyone explicitly setting out to do it, as an unacknowledged byproduct of the system of human production. Now with the advent of LLM powered theorem provers the theorem proving can happen in the absence of…