> The math result is a result only when it includes proof. The proof is the value here. The way somebody came to it isn't really important - we don't know how Newton came to his results, whether it was apple or pear, and it isn't really important. Or how Einstein was walking the city streets looking at the tower watches - it is just historic curiosity having no real value for science.

This mischaracterizes the role of rigourous proofs in mathematical understanding. While undergrads and early grad students focus primarily on proofs, formalism recedes into the secondary role of honing intuition as mathematicians transition to their "post-rigourous" stage of development[1].

The importance of intuition in mathematics cannot be overstated. That's why people go to math talks even when the actual results are codified in papers. In a less formal setting, they get to pick the author's brain to learn their mental pictures and heuristics that don't make their way into papers. Those would be analogous to chain-of-thought traces and agent-to-agent messages for a computer generated result.

[1]: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...