A Tourist Mathematician’s Apologia: Living in a Human-AGI World

Graham Greene described G. H. Hardy’s 1940 book, A Mathematician’s Apology , as the best account of what it is like to be a creative artist. Hardy had many friends, wide-ranging interests that included the game of cricket, and empathy for the less well-off. But it was his creative work in pure mathematics that gave Hardy “the one great permanent happiness of my life.” “Mathematics,” writes C. P. Snow, “was his [Hardy’s] justification.” It gave meaning to his life. Fast forward to October 2026, when OpenAI released more than 700 AI-generated documents claiming to have solved or made major progress in over 300 areas of mathematics. Many of these are ‘solutions’ to the most difficult mathematical concepts that have challenged mathematicians for decades and some for centuries. Mathematicians used to spend entire lifetimes, as Hardy did, solving only one or a few of these problems. OpenAI deployed an advanced ‘reasoning’ LLM and a swarm of 10,000 AI agents that required an average of only three hours of computation per solution. The solutions to these 700-plus problems were ‘checked’ not by humans but by another computer program, making the process almost entirely free of human interven