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What does the end of mathematics look like?

A blog containing essays, of varying cogency, about various things that my mind have wandered to.

As a prelude to what is to follow, I must say that while I am not a professional mathematician (I have a masters degree in theoretical physics and work in the software world), I do enjoy reading the occasional textbook or review paper, and wandering through its pages in a type of reverie, like walking through a glade looking at flowers. If you believe that research-level mathematics exists primarily to enable the posing and proof/disproof of theorems that are somehow ‘important’, or the development of new algorithms and methods that can be applied to achieve some end in the physical world, the rise of machine learning models that can (dis-)prove, let us say, the Riemann hypothesis, might excite you. The most dystopian version of this that I can imagine would look like the ascendancy of inscrutable models that have completely surpassed our level of understanding, that can only with extreme effort be made to render these results in a manner comprehensible to even top mathematicians, and that are all owned by private companies or governments.

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