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well math has always been about "understanding things" -- hence proofs and etc is the main tool in the field

(and why math differentiates between conjectures (maybe true) and theorems)

so that "oh some 3rd party person/machine understood it for me" can feel... a bit icky

Even pre-AI, there have been proofs that took years to be verified, understood and some were disputed forever and still are (like the Mochizuki / IUT drama). So, even without AI, maths has reached a point of specialization, where only a few people in the world know the areas used in a proof well enough to check it. When „new math“ is invented for a proof, people may even be more disincentivied to put in the effort. So, I‘d argue, AI makes understanding new proofs easier, not more difficult.

And yet for someone like me who is not a math expert, it has (all) always felt unapproachably foreign.

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