[soulofmischief]

Terence Tao, one of the most important living mathematicians, specifically embraces Lean and has been helping the community embrace it.

What you've done here is an overgeneralization. "People who like math" and "people who like computers" are massive demographics with considerable overlap.

[vitriol83]

Formalised proofs and Lean in particular are still too cumbersome for the ``working'' mathematician to use it day-to-day for research-level math. But clearly there is some interest on where it may take us in future.

[groundzeros2015]

> one of the most important living

Maybe. But more clearly one of the most popular online.

[lanstin]

He's a Field's Medalist so that's automatically one of the most important living. He is good at explaining things; I leaned on his Analysis textbooks when I was taking analysis and functional analysis to great effect; in a research class I was trying to calculate Fourier transforms of algebraic sets and found various almost throw away comments on his blog that were extremely enlightening (alas only to the extent I could follow them). He's a legit great mind of modern mathematics - and also able to communicate well; a historical rarity indeed.

The topic being discussed here has been addressed specifically in his mastodon posts - the pre-LLM math process was understood to be "state a proof, validate a proof" - but the real aim was the not explicit "digest the proof so we can extend to other results" - with LLM/lean making the first two a lot easier and possible to do without accomplishing the digestion into the mathematical community; so we need to add "digesting proofs (from where ever)" into the job description. Thread starts here: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116477351524980995