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When A.I. Comes for Your Purpose in Life

In the span of just a few months, A.I. systems have solved some of the biggest outstanding problems in math — adding mathematicians to the list of those terrified of losing their job to the technology.
Duration
35m
Broadcast on
13 Oct 2026
Audio Format
other

Artificial intelligence has gone from struggling with basic arithmetic to helping solve some of mathematics’ most famous open problems — and the field is reckoning with what that means.

Steven Strogatz, a professor of mathematics at Cornell University, describes the excitement and grief of watching A.I. take on work that gives people a sense of purpose — and asks what could be lost if machines deliver answers without the human struggle, insight and understanding that make solving problems meaningful.

Guest: Steven Strogatz, a professor of mathematics at Cornell University who writes for The New York Times about the future of research.

Background reading: 

Photo: Ian C. Bates for The New York Times

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For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. This morning one of the hardest problems in mathematics may have just been solved, not by a human, but by artificial intelligence. So many people are freaked out about AI taking their jobs, and now you can add mathematicians to that list. In the span of just a few months, AI systems have tackled some of the biggest problems in math, and they've solved them. For decades, mathematicians have been working to solve this problem. They haven't been able to crack it, but AI, it just did it easily. Last month, it was one of the fields so-called Millennium Problems, and then last week, Open AI released a torrent of over 350 other results, covering virtually every corner of mathematics. These are problems that literally the smartest humans on Earth have been working on for decades and sometimes even centuries. This AI takeover of the field has raised some uncomfortable questions and unleashed a range of emotions. And so today, we speak with a mathematician, Cornell math professor Stephen Strogats, about what happens when AI doesn't just come for your job, but for your purpose. It's Tuesday, October 13th. Steve Strogats, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, Rachel. I'm really happy to see you and be here with you. So Steve, one of the reasons we're talking to you is, of course, because you are an esteemed professor at Cornell, but we are really talking to you because you are known for translating math into English for those of us who do not speak math. And you actually have a book that gets at this very thing. It is called Big Math, and so we are turning to you to help sort of translate this destabilizing moment in math that you and your colleagues are living through. Yeah, can you just start by explaining to us, how would you sum up the mood in math right now? Ooh, the mood. Yeah, the mood, the mood is, um, discombobulated. We're all a swirl. We're spinning. Some people are exhilarated. They see a great golden age upon us with the help of our computer friends. Most people, I think, are feeling grief, and we're in different stages. Some people are bargaining, some are accepting, some are still denying. What stage of grief are you in? Today, I'm feeling pretty good. I have been dark. There have been days when I actually cried during interviews. You know what actually being lost is, um, we like to think of ourselves as heroes. And maybe that's over. That's the big news. It's hard to be a hero if you can't be the first to solve a problem or to understand something or to explain it to the world. And for the thousands of years that our culture of math has existed, we, some of us, did fantasize about being heroes in our own story. And now that's over. At least, I mean, this is the grief version of myself talking.

Transcription truncated.

In the span of just a few months, A.I. systems have solved some of the biggest outstanding problems in math — adding mathematicians to the list of those terrified of losing their job to the technology.