UW–Madison’s Mitchell Nathan, a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in Learning Sciences with the School of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology, has joined “Proofs and Reasons: Toward a Cognitive Science of Real Mathematics,” a new working group convened by the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). 

Nathan was among a select group of international scholars that gathered in October to explore what it means to understand advanced mathematics and mathematical proofs. The group is studying how generative AI is affecting mathematics and how mathematicians make new discoveries, with the goal of ensuring continued innovation in the field.

“I believe that one of the promising benefits of this initiative fostered by the Santa Fe Institute and its sponsors will be the formation of a new line of scientific inquiry about the nature of mathematical reasoning and discovery,” says Nathan.

“In many ways, training professional research mathematicians is a lot like training elite athletes, and even mathematical teams,” Nathan adds. “Mathematicians need these enormous challenges to build the kinds of personal and community-wide intellectual skills to move the field forward… Losing these challenges to AI is like ridding the world of the Tour de France or the Olympics.”

The working group will convene for three years with funding from the John Templeton Foundation.

Operating as an independent, nonprofit organization, the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is the world’s leading research center for complex systems science. 

Read more about the new working group.