Logician, musician, special edition. I run upper division math at Chaminade University, and study computability theory/LEAN when I can. Opinions my own. He/him.
Honolulu, HI
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David J. Webb retweeted
I was part of a group that met last week to try to propose recommended changes to the structure of math PhD programs in an age of AI. Our report, together with a collection of related resources, is now available here:
cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/aimathp…
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David J. Webb retweeted
Every leftist should read theory: trivial, obvious
Every leftist should workout: banal, unimportant
Every leftist should learn differential equations: true, Avant garde, revolutionary
Hot math take: everyone should learn what derivatives and integrals are. Basic calculus is really useful imo
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David J. Webb retweeted
Mostly endorsed but I'm sure there will be plenty of other things for mathematicians to do with AI other than digest outputs! Still I support the encouragement of thoughtful preparation for digestion becoming a far more substantial aspect of human mathematical labor.
I'm happy to announce two important letters on AI and mathematics.
1. A timely letter on the recent AI advances in mathematics : sites.google.com/view/releas…
2. A general letter on math+AI: sites.google.com/view/math-a…
Signatures open to any mathematician with a university affiliation!
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David J. Webb retweeted
I hereby rename "Computer Science" to "Super Science." Putting "Computer" in front makes it sound like a fake science, but it's very real, super real, the realest of the real
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I have plenty of issues with the Frontier labs, but OpenAI did what they claimed - published a solution to a Millennium Prize Problem.
If you don’t like the problem statement, take it up with the Clay Institute. As the article itself concedes, they set it up that way!
Turns out that AI did not solve Navier-Stokes problem. I suspected as much, but I’m not a theoretical mathematician or fluid dynamics expert.
You should never believe breathless AI hype.
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David J. Webb retweeted
Really good observations. It's startling to see people who declare a newfound passion for "taste" not understand that human mastery and learning is essential for the formation of such taste and that what's happening to maths is worrisome insofar as it might herald a broader transformation of intellectual fields.
I think the scary part of LLMs here is less so about individual mathematicians being unable to compete with AI, it’s that individual mathematicians who can solve problems without the assistance of it will simply disappear. A diverse set of ways of thinking will just collapse. In this regard, math is becoming what has happened to visual arts, except even fewer has an emotional connection to it and care about it.
Today there is a Silicon Valley obsession with taste. Taste is the idea of getting people and machines to generate thoughtfully created and differentiated works instead of mass-produced, semi-deterministic set of works. If you want to acquire taste, you have to get really good at a craft, like the Japanese mochi makers. Only when you get really good at a craft, you could actually understand how to apply tools like LLMs effectively, by knowing how to plan your workflows better. Sadly, American universities have been, in my opinion, rather terrible at making students get really really good at a craft.
Let’s take writing for example. I am certainly not the best writer in the world. I was simply not trained on rhetoric nor literature. But I myself write a Substack, imperfectly, without the use of LLMs in the content. The one reason I still write on Substack is that it makes me better at reading. I not only get to express my ideas, I also get to know who doesn’t care about my time and energy by throwing me LLM slop to read.
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David J. Webb retweeted
Wtf CIC + LEM proves Con(ZF) ?!? Which then gives a proof of Con(ZF) in axiom-free Lean + LEM. Found by Mario Carneiro with Fable. Finally some progress on the big questions in type theoretic metamathematics...
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Always fun to see these on twitter relatively early and really freak out the frontier models
636606729769440499166579950236036751749912014371509557713570027508971809534551913252252094954941974952859310861988904737359709200557919
is a factor of RSA-896
saweis.net/posts/rsa-896.htm…
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David J. Webb retweeted
Rumors are swirling that I have made significant progress (though not yet a full solution) on understanding what the Hodge conjecture says.
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David J. Webb retweeted
I wish more of the discourse around the future of math as a profession talked about teaching.
Bottom line is that if there's lots of great universities with students who take calculus and linear algebra, math research will survive in some form, and if there aren't it won't.
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My little note is out!
I had a pet conjecture that bothered me for years, and that resisted all the intricate direct constructions I could throw at it.
Then Astra turned up a 1966 paper which I was able to combine with my existing results to finally put it to bed!
Canonical Expansions of \mathbb R_{\mathcal Q}-Germs
arXiv:2609.13189
A Note on Lowness for \Pi^0_1-Immunity
arXiv:2609.13297
Medvedev logic is undecidable
arXiv:2609.13359
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Wholly endorsed!
Perhaps this is self-interested, but particularly like that this implicitly recognizes that the mathematical community should be more than those who excel at “publish or perish”, as exposition and interpersonal engagement also advance the field.
I've written an essay on how I think the mathematics profession should adapt to highly capable AI systems. It's hosted here on "Proofs and Prompts": proofsandprompts.com/2026/09…
though you should also feel free to complain/comment on my website here: daniellitt.com/blog/2026/9/1…
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David J. Webb retweeted
yeah, douglas adams is pure reddit humour. also, i watched this show called seinfeld, and it was so clearly just a tamer knock-off of always sunny! and then i tried watching this play called hamlet that everyone told me so good, but the plot and dialogue were full of cliches!
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David J. Webb retweeted
With all the Navier–Stokes excitement, I almost forgot to say that our tiny billiard ball has made it to @PNASNews — and yes, it can run a universal computer! 🎱💻
Undecidability already lives in dimension two. Today with @Isaacramr__ at PNAS.
pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.26…
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David J. Webb retweeted
this is the perfect encapsulation of the last 6 months of AI progress:
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TeXed and uploaded to the arxiv!
Last time I did this, in the span between the upload and moderation being completed, I found an error and had to retract it.
This time during that span, I may have found a shorter proof?!?
I’ve been wrong about this conjecture before, but now that it’s down to a Lachlan paper and a coding trick I’m familiar with, I’m feeling pretty confident my handwritten notes on it are correct.
I will have to TeX it up and see if it withstands that level of scrutiny!
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