A Triumvirate of AI Driven Theoretical Discovery

These informal notes are based on the author's lecture at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics workshop on "AI to Assist Mathematical Reasoning" in June 2023. The goal is to think through a path by which we might arrive at AI that is useful for the research mathematician.

This is an essay about the value of mathematical and symbolic reasoning in the age of AI.

Recent advances in computing have changed not only the nature of mathematical computation, but mathematical proof and inquiry itself. While artificial intelligence and formalized mathematics have been the major topics of this conversation, this paper explores another class of tools for advancing mathematics research: databases of mathematical objects that enable semantic search. In addition to defining and exploring examples of these tools, we illustrate a particular line of ...

Over the last decades, a class of important mathematical results have required an ever increasing amount of human effort to carry out. For some, the help of computers is now indispensable. We analyze the implications of this trend towards "big mathematics", its relation to human cognition, and how machine support for big math can be organized. The central contribution of this position paper is an information model for "doing mathematics", which posits that humans very efficie...

This paper explores the relationship of artificial intelligence to the task of resolving open questions in mathematics. We first present an updated version of a traditional argument that limitative results from computability and complexity theory show that proof discovery is an inherently difficult problem. We then illustrate how several recent applications of artificial intelligence-inspired methods -- respectively involving automated theorem proving, SAT-solvers, and large ...

In this essay, I argue that mathematics is a natural science---just like physics, chemistry, or biology---and that this can explain the alleged "unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. The main challenge for this view is to explain how mathematical theories can become increasingly abstract and develop their own internal structure, whilst still maintaining an appropriate empirical tether that can explain their later use in physics. In order to addr...

This submission to arXiv is the report of a panel session at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians (Rio de Janeiro, August). It is intended that, while v1 is that report, this stays a living document containing the panelists', and others', reflections on the topic.

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...

This overview article highlights the critical role of mathematics in artificial intelligence (AI), emphasizing that mathematics provides tools to better understand and enhance AI systems. Conversely, AI raises new problems and drives the development of new mathematics at the intersection of various fields. This article focuses on the application of analytical and probabilistic tools to model neural network architectures and better understand their optimization. Statistical qu...

How did humanity coax mathematics from the aether? We explore the Platonic view that mathematics can be discovered from its axioms - a game of conjecture and proof. We describe Minimo (Mathematics from Intrinsic Motivation): an agent that jointly learns to pose challenging problems for itself (conjecturing) and solve them (theorem proving). Given a mathematical domain axiomatized in dependent type theory, we first combine methods for constrained decoding and type-directed syn...