Isn't there an analogy here to what's happening in software engineering? People keep saying things like "software engineering is so much more than programming". Couldn't one say that "mathematics is so much more than writing proofs"?

At least for now someone still has to decide what to prove and why. Like why are you trying to prove that thing to begin with? Presumably it's a step along some journey, right? Maybe the journey is where you need to start deriving your satisfaction from, then.

I know most people here are already well into their careers so they might not even notice at this point, but the CS job market isn't just 'going through a tough spot' for new grads. The entire market is down in general, but entry level? Entry Level Hirings have literally collapsed. Roughly 65-75% of entry level hiring dissapeared since 2019 at major segments of the tech industry.

One thing with programming is that LLMs are actually pretty bad at it, and use of them for that purpose is driven entirely by hype. I'm not remotely qualified to judge the mathematical realm, but mathematicians seem to think that LLMs can do the math well. So there's a significant difference there. In programming, we will see a major pull back from LLMs as the abysmal quality of vibe software becomes too prominent to ignore, but the same might not happen in math if they can actually do the job.

There are lots of similarities currently within software engineering and mathematics and a lot of analogies which apply to Software engineering apply to mathematics and vice versa.

> At least for now someone still has to decide what to prove and why. Like why are you trying to prove that thing to begin with? Presumably it's a step along some journey, right? Maybe the journey is where you need to start deriving your satisfaction from, then.

Beautifully said. I had been thinking about the same thing and the analogy b/w CS and mathematics and these were some that I had found:

1.) to prove/disprove from the proofs that OAI created, you needed an mathematician to do so and OAI had to withdraw three mathematical proofs.[0]

But it was only because an expert within the field could verify if it was true or not, I feel as if software engineering is the same as well. We are/can be paid to prove/disprove if a software is working as intended or not.

2.) for someone to be that said mathematician who disproved it, he had to learn the basics of mathematics and multiple branches of it to then perhaps specialize in one thing that he most strongly resonated with and within all this learning, there was some struggle definitely involved. They had to learn algebra etc.,

this analogy can also extend to how we teach children algebra/calculations and other things even though we have had calculators for a long time, yet, we teach children how to do calculations because it is still valuable enough and either teaching maths can help them perhaps in future make a mathematician or it can help them be less reliant on simply calculators and more confident on on the spot calculations and help them within this skill.

As knowing calculation has become the norm rather than exception, even though we have calculators. In fact knowing how to do calculation by hand can perhaps better help you write a problem to calculator. Knowing the technical aspects of CS can help you express a problem to AI with much more depth and effectiveness as well.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50002650

Yes. I wrote about it here in the other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50000421#50000660

I’m frankly a bit disappointed that Tao published the blog post I linked to above.

Telling OpenAI they shouldn’t test frontier math on their internal models is just plain nuts and illogical. It’s surprising that the advanced math community can lack so much logic.