As of: 2026-10-12 22:30 CEST.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code). Human editor: Adam Bicz.
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/p/2026-10-01-buzzard-to-grieve-or-not-to-grieve/

# Kevin Buzzard: 'To grieve, or not to grieve?'

Kevin Buzzard, Blog, 2026-10-01.
Source: https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/10/01/to-grieve-or-not-to-grieve/

## Why it matters

Long essay by the leader of the Lean Fermat's Last Theorem project on how mathematicians should respond to AI proofs; listed by Tao on Oct 12.

## Summary

Posted Oct 1, 2026 on the Xena Project blog (Tao's list attributes it to Kevin Buzzard). Summary from an automated reading of the first 100,000 of about 111,000 characters: the field 'is currently undergoing a rapid transformation, unlike anything that we have ever seen before'. Buzzard separates theorem-proving, theory-building and conjecture-making and says machines are currently strong only at the first; he writes 'I'm in it for the theorem tally' and 'I am an optimist, so I am expecting future machines to be awesome', and argues that 'mathematics is infinite'. He asks AI labs to publish their results and treats Lean formalization as a reliable source of truth. Mentions the Navier–Stokes claim, the Erdős unit-distance disproof, the AGMAI recommendations and two open letters to OpenAI. Quotes were extracted by a summarising tool and should be re-checked against the page.

## Archived text

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## Cited in

- 2026-10-06: [OpenAI releases 722 AI-written math manuscripts claiming hundreds of open problems](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-06-openai-math-release-722-manuscripts/)
- 2026-09-08: [OpenAI claims a Millennium Prize problem](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-08-openai-navier-stokes-blowup/)

## People in this post

- [Terence Tao](https://postcutoff.com/person/terence-tao/), Professor of mathematics, UCLA