What does the end of mathematics look like?

Summary

What does the end of mathematics look like? Wherein I muse about the value of understanding. For those who like a pithy takeaway, I propose that the end of mathematics does not look unlike the end of striving for understanding, and the improvement of the singular human mind. Posted on: May 18, 2025 Word count: 1484 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. My wife has opinions about this - I suppose most of us who compare textbooks and theorems to forests and flowers are not so well glued to the more mundane aspects of life (such as remembering to feed ourselves, or to tame our appearance so as not to startle strangers). My distance from a professional mathematical setting gives me the space to indulge a type of speculation which might invite scorn from the more hard-headed type of academic, and it is to this freedom that I owe this essay. I was recently contacted by someone who wants to pay people to, as far as I can determine, write Lean/mathlib proofs to train an LLM, or some other type of machine learning model. This was interesting for several reasons - one is that I don’t actually know Lean/mathlib (a fact I hope to remedy at some point), but also because it brought to the fore a topic I have been mulling over for a while. What would it mean if the thing that some people intuitively believe to be important about mathematics, namely that it is part of, and an expression of, the human desire to understand our world and ourselves (and perhaps thereby improve these things) becomes completely subsumed by the machinery of capitalism? To expand: what if the practice of mathematics becomes completely determined by the diktats of a vast capitalist machinery of proprietary machi...