It's a good question.
Pure maths has foreshadowed a lot of physics, and a lot of Computer Science. We should probably keep doing it.
Does the current model (of highly-talented academics at Universities mostly arguing with each other) change because of AI? Does it invalidate human effort, or does it allow humans to push the boundaries further? Is there no point in training or paying for mathematicians because AI will take over the whole role?
Or, as we're finding with so many other areas, does AI do its best work when guided by someone who knows the area and subject well?
What do you mean by invalidate? It means we no longer need to understand math, of course.
When Claude made progress on the Riemann conjecture, here are the kind of prompts used:
> Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”).2 This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.
It seems like the kind of prompts a high schooler could come up with. The prompter is the creator of bun.js, a kind of janky JavaScript execution environment. It seems like we no longer need to know the subject well at all.