The evolving role of AI in mathematical discovery

 

The last five years have seen AI-driven breakthroughs in research-level mathematics, prompting excitement and discussion about the future of mathematics research. On Monday, May 4th, Helen Jenne (Whitman ’13, Data Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) will give an overview of these developments, from AI’s role in rigorously verifying proofs to its use in discovering interesting mathematical constructions and formulating conjectures. AI for mathematics extends well beyond prompting a GPT to prove a theorem; in fact, the field has seen many success stories from smaller, targeted models. The first half of the talk will provide a survey of the current landscape, and the second half will discuss recent work applying an LLM-based approach called evolutionary program synthesis to the challenge of finding combinatorial bijections. Most examples will be drawn from graph theory and combinatorics, but no prior background in these subjects will be assumed. This talk will be accessible to a general mathematical audience. 

Bio: Helen Jenne is a data scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Seattle, where her research focuses on AI for mathematical discovery and AI assurance. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Oregon, where she specialized in algebraic combinatorics, and graduated from Whitman in 2013 with degrees in math and psychology. 

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