Why experts disagree about whether AI will change mathematics forever – or just help

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American‘S Science fastI’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, representing Rachel Feltman.

In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess giant Garry Kasparov at his own game, leading to a flood of headlines about whether Deep Blue was truly intelligent and whether computers could now outperform humans. The answer, at least then, was mostly no.

But it’s now 2026 and we have a growing number of generative AI models that have us asking once again: “Can machines outperform us?” To investigate this question, a group of researchers this time turned not to chess, but to mathematics.

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To find out more, I spoke to Joe Howlett, an employee…