---
title: "On a Lawn in Cambridge, Ice Cream for a Dying Craft"
description: "OpenAI’s published proofs have MIT’s mathematics doctoral students counting the years of work a model can erase"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-15T09:32:08.817Z
modified: 2026-10-15T16:23:21Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/on-a-lawn-in-cambridge-ice-cream-for-a-dying-craft-23d6b0
language: en
tags: ["ai", "education", "jobs", "math", "mit", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# On a Lawn in Cambridge, Ice Cream for a Dying Craft

*OpenAI’s published proofs have MIT’s mathematics doctoral students counting the years of work a model can erase*

By Jan Sokol · October 15, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/on-a-lawn-in-cambridge-ice-cream-for-a-dying-craft-23d6b0

## In brief

- OpenAI published proofs it says answer some of mathematics’ hardest problems; their accuracy is still being assessed
- An MIT survey of 45 graduate students found 75% fear AI will hurt tenure-track chances; 71% have considered pivoting
- An August MIT report found AI agents can complete any written undergraduate assignment
- Professor Pavel Etingof expects mathematicians to shift from proving theorems to interpreting AI output
- Sandwich boards on campus advertise a six-month OpenAI “immersive experience” for graduate students

There is a lawn outside the mathematics department at MIT where a meeting about the future of mathematics recently ended with an ice cream social. Inside the lecture hall, before the ice cream, graduate students had stood up one by one to describe their fear, and professors had stood up one by one to describe their love. Between the two sentiments — [as the Boston Globe’s Michaela Towfighi reports](https://bostonglobe.com/2026/10/15/metro/mit-ai-math-students-openai/) — lies the question now hanging over one of the finest mathematics departments on earth: what happens to the people when the proof comes from the machine?

The occasion was a set of proofs published by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, demonstrating that its technology could answer some of the most complicated questions in the field. It will take time, the Globe notes, to sort out the significance and accuracy of those proofs. But among the graduate students the overarching feeling is already settled: a fear of being displaced, if not replaced.

“The personal stakes are kind of highest for us,” said Dora Woodruff, a third-year math PhD student. “We’re the ones who are actually going to be on the job market in a couple years. We’re the ones thinking about whether we want to spend our lives in this field, dedicating \[it\] to this kind of work.” Woodruff studies combinatorics — counting and patterns — and has marvelled at hundred-page proofs about polytopes. In recent months, the Globe writes, that excitement has been engulfed by the fear.

![A person holding an ice cream sits on a park bench facing a large, melting cream-colored geometric sculpture, with university buildings and trees behind it.](https://rews.cc/img/7a484834407a6978b884f314a2ba6d096c3cc45a.webp)

## Forty-five out of a hundred and twenty

To prove that others felt it too, Woodruff did what a mathematician does: she counted. In August, with fifth-year doctoral students Hanna Mularczyk and Anna Brandenberger, she surveyed the department on the state of mathematics in the age of AI. Forty-five of 120 graduate students responded. Three out of four said they feared AI will make it harder to land a tenure-track job; 71 percent said their chances of continuing into “academic math” had decreased. One student said AI had made the field boring; another said they were afraid of falling behind if they didn’t buy in. At the meeting in the lecture hall, professors spoke of their personal love for mathematics; students spoke of a field turned less collaborative, more unstable — a race against the machine.

The department’s anxiety sits inside a wider reckoning. AI is almost all anyone can talk about on campus, and President Sally Kornbluth has told the community by email that the school has a “duty to prepare our students to know when and how to use AI effectively, wisely, ethically, and responsibly, and when not to use it at all.” Every class syllabus now carries an AI use policy. A 40-page university report published in August, the work of a committee of faculty and students, found that AI agents had grown advanced enough to complete any written undergraduate assignment — and that office hours were effectively obsolete, students trading conversations with teaching assistants for chatbots.

![A sunlit study has a wooden desk with a blue surface and monitor, three wooden chairs, bookshelves, and a window overlooking a stone tower.](https://rews.cc/img/1a88404939843a5de574a5f452eeffae8f3e824f.webp)

Elsewhere the loudest sound is the scraping of chairs as institutions reposition. A Brown University faculty group recommended clear AI rules in July; at Harvard, David Deming, dean of the undergraduate college, has made usage policies a priority for the year; the University of Chicago has marched in the opposite direction and banned laptops from its law school classrooms.

## Chat said to do it that way

Last year a student came to Mularczyk for help with a problem in multivariable calculus. He wondered whether he had solved it correctly, then admitted that “Chat said to do it that way.” “I actually had to defend myself against Chat about a calculus problem, which is not really fun,” Mularczyk said.

She was taught that “the way you learn to be a mathematician is to struggle through math.” Now, in many math classes, students are encouraged to use AI, and instant results arrive without explanation. “There’s maybe this instinct to be like, ‘Here’s all the toys, play with them,’ “ she said. “Oftentimes, our goal is not to have an oracle built into your computer to tell you what to do.”

Between classes, undergraduates told the Globe it has grown harder to find companions for the all-nighters that the notoriously hard problem sets once demanded; a few years ago that would not have been a consideration, but Claude or ChatGPT can now produce a fairly accurate answer in minutes. Woodruff laughed at the department’s old stereotype — “antisocial mathematicians” — while noting that the threat has provided common ground across campus. Humanities students console her that mathematicians and artists now face the same thing: “This sort of encroachment of AI on what we do, people questioning the value of what we can produce,” as Woodruff put it.

![Three people work with a giant tangled mound of blue rope beside an enormous zipper stretching across a barren plain beneath a blue sky.](https://rews.cc/img/2d64d97ace43fde58a9dd0369e167128907d55d6.webp)

Pavel Etingof, a tenured professor in the department, long considered the mathematician’s job to “expand the boundaries of the field by proving new theorems.” That, he knows, will no longer be the case for his students. “Proving new theorems is very difficult and requires ingenuity, it requires big computations and sometimes it requires complicated abstract technical tools, and also it requires a lot of knowledge and background,” he said. “There will be less of that now because powerful AI models can do it faster and faster, and better.” He sees the role shifting from technician to translator: “This work might be done by AI, but somebody needs to interpret this and communicate this. I’m hopeful that \[the\] mathematical profession will still exist and, in fact, become more interesting even than before.”

Hope is a tenured luxury. Mularczyk described scrolling through the most recent set of OpenAI proofs, “praying that a problem we were working on was not on there” — because if it were, years of work would halt. “With that work goes all of the exploration, understanding, and discussion involved in that process, gone, dead in the water,” she said. A job search in academia, the Globe writes, now feels fleeting, and many are not sure what a plan B would look like.

Plan B, in any case, is advertising itself. Scattered across the campus, including on a sandwich board just off Killian Court, signs offer graduate students a suggestion: “a six-month immersive experience” at OpenAI. The empire builds the machine that ends the craft, then recruits the craftsmen. It is an old arrangement; only the speed is new.