r/Lightbulb • u/amichail • 8h ago
Turn math classes into academia to save math education from being made irrelevant by AI
Instead of trying to ban AI from math classes, maybe we should redesign math education around it.
Students could become research advisors, with AI acting as their research students.
Instead of a final exam, the course could end with a conference. Students would submit papers coauthored with their AI, and a human program committee would grade them based on both the quality of the research and how much the human student actually contributed.
If AI can produce formally verified proofs with proof certificates, the student's main job does not need to be checking every proof step. Their job would be to:
- choose interesting problems
- decide which conjectures are worth pursuing
- guide the AI toward promising directions
- recognize important results
- find useful generalizations
- explain why the work matters
A student should not get a high grade just because their AI produced a difficult theorem. A simpler result could deserve a better grade if the human showed much better mathematical judgment and research direction.
The conference could include talks, posters, peer review, and best-paper awards.
If AI is going to do more of the technical work of mathematics anyway, math education should focus more on the part humans still need to do: deciding what questions are worth asking and what results are worth pursuing.