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by raphlinus·2y ago·view on hn ↗
The description of "project manager mathematicians" reminded me of "A letter to my old friend Jonathan" [1] and the followup [2] by Edsger Dijkstra from 1975. It was written as satire, basically criticizing the way that software was produced by showing how ridiculous it would be to produce mathematics the same way. But in some ways it was prescient. Of course, the main point of these documents is to critique intellectual property (particularly the absurdity of applying it to mathematical truth) but fortunately that aspect is not a significant concern of this push toward mechanization.

[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/E...

[2]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/E...

3 comments
LLMs can do math. AFAIK I know this is the SOTA if you don't formalize it:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13867

This was fantastic. Thank you for sharing it!
Except it's a non sensical comparison? 99.999% of software is not living on the cutting edge and is just engineering implementation that can be managed.