Is mathematics over, or just graduating?

Christian Szegedy uses a personal memory of competitive math and a rich jungle metaphor to explain how pure mathematics has traditionally valued lone exploration: mapping unknown terrain, climbing hard conjectural peaks for prestige, inventing artisan tools, and occasionally uncovering practical “mineral” applications. The account emphasizes that the disciplinary reward system prizes heroic, technically demanding climbs more than tool-building or applied extraction, and that much of mathematicians’ identity and community status grew from that rite of passage.

He then compares the arrival of powerful AI to the airplane revolution: early models are primitive but already able to reach and flag problems that once required heroic effort, and they will rapidly improve. That shift will democratize access, commodify routine discoveries, enable large-scale mapping and extraction, and change what the profession values - choosing problems, managing fleets of models, and communicating results will matter more than hand‑crafted proofs. Institutions will lag, many practitioners will grieve a lost era, but mathematics will expand into an industrial, infrastructural role across science and technology; Szegedy welcomes that transformation and anticipates a fundamentally different practice.