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Yeah, I'm mathematician-adjacent (at one point I expected to go into the field), and I share your frustration. I don't have too much sympathy for the mathematicians and others who have protested against what, when you get right down to it, is just announcing new knowledge.
But it's not zero sympathy. They do have something of a point about how this affects the motivation of human mathematicians. Lots of things can be learned by working towards resolving Navier-Stokes, spawning new approaches and even new kinds of math. (The Millennium Problems weren't just suddenly posed by some smart guy one day, after all - they're the end result of a long chain of working on other problems.) And while it's likely that AI can do this kind of exploration, that's just not as sexy (and, math being the weird esoteric subject that it is, a lot of this exploration is only even meaningful to those doing the exploring).
Is there anything stopping humans from continuing to explore Navier-Stokes and related problems, even now that we have an oracle that can just tell us the final answer? Of course not. But we're irrational beings, and we're likely just not going to put the same kind of effort into it without the reward waiting at the end.
That's the steelman of their argument, at least. I still don't entirely agree with it. An analogy is that humans stopped having to master running once we invented horse riding and bikes and cars and so on. Without the end goal of being able to travel better, why would humans bother to keep working at being good runners? But the tools we developed didn't just help us travel faster, they also helped us run better (through better sports science, better shoes, better health/nutrition, a larger population free to pursue running as an interest, etc.), and modern athletes would kick the ever-loving crap out of the ancient Greeks at their own Olympics. Even though they were doing it (more or less) for survival and we're doing it for fun.
I think math is going to go that way too. We're close to the threshold where AI is so much better at math than us that we can't even contribute. Pushing the frontier of math will no longer require humans. But those of us who enjoy math aren't just going to lie down and die! When it comes to humans doing math, I think the tools are going to help us achieve levels of understanding that mathematicians decades ago never could.
(As an aside, Ravi Vakil was my International Math Olympiad coach way back in 1996. I'm tickled to see him on this committee!)
Sure yes I agree. But the fault for this lies with humans, not with AI. Humans should be blaming themselves for this and resolving to do better.
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My guess would be that since not much can be learned from a million or so lines of Lean, the results are not exciting in that way -- IANAM, but somewhat adjacent I guess, and my impression is that the result is not really the point in most cases. The proof itself is very important, and if the LLM is acting as some sort of Lean fuzzer then it's not that interesting. OFC we don't know what's going on without seeing the proofs, but I can't imagine they'd be holding off on some novel elegant proof of the Riemann Hypothesis or whatever.
OpenAI released a formal paper describing the proof, just like any other mathematical result. Mathematicians can work through it themselves. Don't focus on the Lean program - like you said, it's not all that valuable by itself, it's really just a certification that the result is valid. It's nice that LLMs now help us get these certificates (Claude did Fermat's Last Theorem a little while ago), but this is just a modern convenience that mathematicians got by for millennia without.
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