Sirawit Pongnakintr
สิรวิชญ์ พงศ์นคินทร์
Before answering that question, let me declare that my view towards mathematics is aligned to mathematical platonism. This is in contrast to some of my friends' views that mathematics is constructed by humans, or that mathematics is just a convenient tool to solve problems. For me, it is more that just a construction or a tool. Mathematics is a realm of unknowns and their connections. The study of mathematics deserves its own purpose, independent of technological advances and independent of applications. However, this doesn't restrict my goals to studying only the pure mathematics. Sometimes I also study mathematics for its applications.
One can characterize my "reason to study" as a combination of simply two things:
Seeing open problems and conjectures, these two motivations push me forward to think about things and to go try solving them for fun (even if I almost always failed).
Recently (at the time of writing this), there are incredible progresses going on in mathematics and theoretical computer science coming from AI. For example, Planar unit distance problem from OpenAI on May 20, 2026, Jacobian conjecture counterexample from levent on Jul 20, 2026, ten advances from OpenAI on Aug 1, 2026, Riemann zeta density lower bound from Anthropic on Aug 10, 2026, and Hadamard matrices of order up to 2000 from levent on Aug 12, 2026. I congratulate them all (both the people prompting the AI and the people developing new AI capabilities). I hold the simultaneous position of being excited with these new results and being depressed with the possibility that there might be nothing left for humans to be done in the near future. This lead me to the current decision to give up on the dream of becoming a mathematician (since there might be no such thing as a mathematician anymore). This may sound depressing, but I can assure that I do not give up on mathematics. I am, and I will, still do mathematics, not because I want to achieve a result, but because I like it and I have fun doing it. I therefore retract my dream of becoming a contributor of mathematics and instead choose the lesser path of becoming simply a person who loves mathematics and want to know more about mathematics.
The next question is whether I support or oppose AI in the current state. My current opinion is that the way the AI is disrupting mathematics is doing some implicit harm more than a lot of people realized. However, I also do not think stopping AI, nor actively decelerating the progress, would be a better choice. I think AI should be accelerated as much as the economic invisible hand wants it to be, not externally accelerated nor decelerated. And I also think AI progress is inevitable: there might be one day when AI can do effectively everything better than human mathematicians. The emphasis, in my opinion, should rather be: how do we adapt to the changes. My dream is adapted, as stated in the above paragraph. I argue that now institutions should adapt as well. In the end, I hope that the society will still let me study mathematics, even if it makes effectively no material benefit to the society. I doubt that the majority would bite that bullet, but for me, I've decided to commit to this hope.
Stupidity doesn't stop me from doing math. I may try and I may fail. And
at least I'm proud to fail rather than not even give it a try. I dare to
dream. To be a great mathematician who stands alongside the frontiers of
humanity. To be a person doing mathematics with happiness, and
learning theories at the forefront of the humanity's knowledge.
And even if I fail, I'd rather die trying hard.
What does it take to be [a mathematician]? I think I know the answer: you have to be born right, you must continually strive to become perfect, you must love mathematics more than anything else, you must work at it hard and without stop, and you must never give up.
— Paul Halmos, 1985