From the String Landscape to the Mathematical Landscape: a Machine-Learning Outlook

We survey some recent applications of machine learning to problems in geometry and theoretical physics. Pure mathematical data has been compiled over the last few decades by the community and experiments in supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised machine learning have found surprising success. We thus advocate the programme of machine learning mathematical structures, and formulating conjectures via pattern recognition, in other words using artificial intelligence to hel...

The current state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence is impressive, especially in terms of mastery of language, but not so much in terms of mathematical reasoning. What could be missing? Can we learn something useful about that gap from how the brains of mathematicians go about their craft? This essay builds on the idea that current deep learning mostly succeeds at system 1 abilities -- which correspond to our intuition and habitual behaviors -- but still lacks something i...

In the words of the esteemed mathematician Paul Erd\"os, the mathematician's task is to \emph{prove and conjecture}. These two processes form the bedrock of all mathematical endeavours, and in the recent years, the mathematical community has increasingly sought the assistance of computers to bolster these tasks. This paper is a testament to that pursuit; it presents a robust framework enabling a computer to automatically generate conjectures - particularly those conjectures t...

Recent years have seen the dramatic rise of the usage of AI algorithms in pure mathematics and fundamental sciences such as theoretical physics. This is perhaps counter-intuitive since mathematical sciences require the rigorous definitions, derivations, and proofs, in contrast to the experimental sciences which rely on the modelling of data with error-bars. In this Perspective, we categorize the approaches to mathematical discovery as "top-down", "bottom-up" and "meta-mathema...

Mathematics is one of the most powerful conceptual systems developed and used by the human species. Dreams of automated mathematicians have a storied history in artificial intelligence (AI). Rapid progress in AI, particularly propelled by advances in large language models (LLMs), has sparked renewed, widespread interest in building such systems. In this work, we reflect on these goals from a \textit{cognitive science} perspective. We call attention to several classical and on...

We propose a paradigm to deep-learn the ever-expanding databases which have emerged in mathematical physics and particle phenomenology, as diverse as the statistics of string vacua or combinatorial and algebraic geometry. As concrete examples, we establish multi-layer neural networks as both classifiers and predictors and train them with a host of available data ranging from Calabi-Yau manifolds and vector bundles, to quiver representations for gauge theories. We find that ev...

We utilize machine learning to study the string landscape. Deep data dives and conjecture generation are proposed as useful frameworks for utilizing machine learning in the landscape, and examples of each are presented. A decision tree accurately predicts the number of weak Fano toric threefolds arising from reflexive polytopes, each of which determines a smooth F-theory compactification, and linear regression generates a previously proven conjecture for the gauge group rank ...

We review, for a general audience, a variety of recent experiments on extracting structure from machine-learning mathematical data that have been compiled over the years. Focusing on supervised machine-learning on labeled data from different fields ranging from geometry to representation theory, from combinatorics to number theory, we present a comparative study of the accuracies on different problems. The paradigm should be useful for conjecture formulation, finding more eff...

Conjectures have historically played an important role in the development of pure mathematics. We propose a systematic approach to finding abstract patterns in mathematical data, in order to generate conjectures about mathematical inequalities, using machine intelligence. We focus on strict inequalities of type f < g and associate them with a vector space. By geometerising this space, which we refer to as a conjecture space, we prove that this space is isomorphic to a Banach ...

While there has been some discussion on how Symbolic Computation could be used for AI there is little literature on applications in the other direction. However, recent results for quantifier elimination suggest that, given enough example problems, there is scope for machine learning tools like Support Vector Machines to improve the performance of Computer Algebra Systems. We survey the authors own work and similar applications for other mathematical software. It may seem t...