Mathslopapocalypse

I once asked a specialist in a particularly obscure mathematical subdiscipline how many people in the world could understand her work. “Maybe 20 or 30,” she said. I thought it sounded lonely not to ever be able to explain to your closest friends and family what you did all day. And yet, within that small group math is a highly social discipline full of collaboration, even if the rest of the world doesn’t see it. This is the opposite of OpenAI’s October 6 announcement that it had released a blob of 722 mathematical papers produced by a “frontier model” covering 372 longstanding open mathematical problems. Within a day, OpenAI retracted three and revised 14 more, according to Retraction Watch. But this is only the beginning of assessing the collection. As Sharon Roberts reports at the New York Times, despite the “gut-punch” with which the papers have landed, none have been peer-reviewed. Many haven’t been formalized. Anecdotally, some that have been inspected by experts in the relevant…