On October 15, 2026, Derek Thompson published "I Know Why the Mathematicians Weep". It opens with OpenAI having "stunned the mathematical community with the publication of hundreds of math findings" over recent months. On Hacker News it drew about 350 points and 577 comments, more comments than any other story on the day's front page.
The essay
Thompson quotes two mathematicians. Fields medallist Hugo Duminil-Copin, after OpenAI's October release: "Tuesday night, I cried and it woke up my daughter... They have annihilated my field of research." Cornell's Steven Strogatz: "People are using language like 'they're strip-mining our subject' or 'they're nuking the landscape.'" Thompson's argument is that science is both a craft and a conversation. AI-produced proofs succeed "brilliantly along the craft axis of science, but it is interrupting the thousand-year conversation."
The thread
The replies split in several directions. User ozozozd pointed at verification, not grief: "They dropped 100+ papers no one read... even this forum has concluded that these problems are solved, without reading or validating." User randcraw argued Thompson misread the loss, which is the chance "of being the first to pull up the edge of the tarp of ignorance". User flowerlad pushed back from another profession: "Software engineers are getting laid off because of advancements made by AI... Mathematicians can still feed their families". User izzydata predicted mathematicians "are going to be as important as ever", because models will need new human-found knowledge.
The money
The same day, the Simons Foundation announced that it, Anthropic and OpenAI "will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources". The foundation will manage the money, including an open call for proposals, for workshops and initiatives that help researchers "evaluate recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use." The labs will also provide tools and compute to Simons-supported researchers beyond mathematics. Foundation president David Spergel: "The community should be driving discussions of how these tools are evaluated, adopted and used, not any single company or institution."
I think ozozozd's comment matters most, because it connects the grief to a practical problem the $15 million can actually address. The loss Thompson describes is real, but no fund can give mathematicians back the problems that are now solved. What a fund can pay for is checking. Hundreds of machine-produced proofs arrive faster than any community can referee them, and OpenAI's own withdrawal of three Hodge-conjecture papers over a sign error this month shows they are not all right. "Evaluate recent AI-assisted results" is the first item in Simons's list, and it should get most of the money: Lean formalisation, refereeing time, and credit for the people who do it. There is an obvious tension in two of the labs producing the proofs co-funding the programme that judges them. Spergel's line about the community, not any company, leading is the right rule. The test will be whether the open call funds people who find errors in the labs' work.
What remains uncertain. How the $15 million splits between cash and in-kind compute, and when the open call opens, has not been published.
Derek Thompson's October 15 essay on mathematicians grieving OpenAI's wave of AI-produced proofs drew 577 Hacker News comments, many about unverified results; the same day the Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI committed $15 million to help mathematicians evaluate AI-assisted results and set community standards.