Future Program: Exponentiating Mathematics (expMath)

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MATHEMATICS IS THE SOURCE OF SIGNIFICANT TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES; HOWEVER, PROGRESS IN MATH IS SLOW. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) suggest the possibility of increasing the rate of progress in mathematics. Still, a wide gap exists between state-of-the-art AI capabilities and pure mathematics research.

Advances in mathematics are slow for two reasons. First, decomposing problems into useful lemmas is a laborious and manual process. To advance the field of mathematics, mathematicians use their knowledge and experience to explore candidate lemmas, which, when composed together, prove theorems. Ideally, these lemmas are generalizable beyond the specifics of the current problem so they can be easily understood and ported to new contexts. Second, proving candidate lemmas is slow, effortful, and iterative. Putative proofs may have gaps, such as the one in Wiles’ original proof of Fermat’s last theorem, which necessitated more than a year of additional work to fix. In theory, formalization in programming languages, such as Lean, could help automate proofs, but translation from math to code and back remains exceedingly difficult.

The significant recent advances in AI fall short of the automated decomposition or auto(in)formalization challenges. Decomposition in formal settings is currently a manual process, as seen in the Prime number theorem and beyond and the Polynomial Freiman-Ruzsa conjecture, with existing tools, such as Blueprint for Lean, only facilitating the structuring of math and code. Auto(in)formalization is an active area of research in the AI literature, but current approaches show poor performance and have not yet advanced to even graduate-level textbook problems. Formal languages with automated theorem-proving tools, such as Lean and Isabelle, have traction in the community for problems where the investment in manual formalization is worth it.

The goal of expMath is to radically accelerate the rate of progress in pure mathematics by developing an AI co-author capable of proposing and proving useful abstractions. expMath will be comprised of teams focused on developing AI capable of auto decomposition and auto(in)formalization and teams focused on evaluation with respect to professional-level mathematics. We will robustly engage with the math and AI communities toward fundamentally reshaping the practice of mathematics by mathematicians.

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