Steven Strogatz has good days and bad days.
Recently, though, the math scholar and professor at Cornell University has been feeling more positive about AI’s brusque entrance into the field to which he’s devoted his life.
“I think I’m pretty far along into the acceptance phase,” he told Business Insider on Wednesday.
Strogatz, 67, has become a kind of de facto spokesman for the math community since he shed tears last month on “The Daily,” the popular New York Times podcast, while talking about the fleeting nature of human life.
“I may end up doing it with you,” he told me about crying in front of a reporter. (He didn’t.)
In the last two months, Strogatz said hundreds of people have sent him emails, from curious students to ministers asking to pray with him. Among the more notable figures hitting him up were OpenAI engineers responsible for the company’s math operations.
Before the AI colossus released hundreds more solutions on October 6, for instance, Strogatz received a phone call from bigwigs at the company, who, he thinks, wanted to gauge his reaction before the dump.
“I think the subtext was: ‘Are you gonna badmouth us tomorrow?'” he said.
As it turned out, though, Strogatz, who has a book coming out this month in part about AI, didn’t have much badmouthing to do.
In an X reply to OpenAI’s post that day, Strogatz highlighted one solution he called “particularly amazing.”
“This leap in progress is like Bob Beamon’s long jump,” he wrote, referencing the athlete’s famous 1968 feat that shattered the previous distance record by nearly two feet.
Part of Strogatz’s fortitude has to do with his position as an educator, he said, where on most weekdays he orates at a lectern before dozens of wide-eyed undergraduates looking to him for answers in a turbulent time.
If he stood before them and, like some have in his field, freaked out — or sullenly declared mathematics over — he’d be doing something of a disservice to his students. It’s also not what he believes.
“I want to give a message of happy optimism, but not stupid optimism,” he said. “Like, let’s keep our eyes open and figure out what we need to do to stay strong.”
So during a recent class at Cornell, after he’d spent over an hour discussing quantum mechanics and the Schrödinger equation — if a cat in a box has a 50% chance of kicking the bucket, at the moment before you open the box, the feline is both alive and dead — a tricky question came up.
And instead of clearing some space on the blackboard and picking up the nub of chalk, Strogatz said he broke out his computer.
“I said, ‘Let’s just see what the AI thinks about this,'” he recalled, adding that AI is a useful tool to enhance understanding after students wrestle with the concept in their minds.
“In other words, I find all kinds of ways to use AI to improve my class,” he said.
To be clear, though, all is not fine and dandy in the world of math. Mathematicians everywhere are reckoning with reams of AI-generated solutions to problems that once animated their dreams and chalkboards.
Jeering from math geeks quickly turned to astonishment, and then soul-searching, after OpenAI in September published solutions to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize question, a famously thorny mathematical question about whether the equations governing fluid motion can break down.
Now, AI programs are at solving levels analogous to or superior to those of grad students, Strogatz said. And without a doubt, the intoxicating satisfaction of finally cracking a problem after suffering over it for years may be getting lost in the flux.
Strogatz recalled one remarkable episode from his youth, in which, after spending years mulling over a mathematical explanation for how systems sync up — like fireflies flashing on a summer night — he experienced a bona fide epiphany.
In what he described as a “psychedelic dream,” the solution came to him in the form of “swirling colored fluids.” And when he woke up, he immediately checked the answer.
It turned out to be right.
“It was the first correct way to formulate this problem,” he said. “That was a big happy time.”
But now, Strogatz says somewhat blithely that with AI doing the solving, future generations likely won’t have similar dreams.
“Unless you struggle like that and suffer, you won’t think of anything deep,” he said. “You’ll just be superficial, and you’ll miss that marvelous human experience.”
“But I don’t want to make too much of it,” he added.
