Terence Tao wrote his comments on this talk here: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113601397729489852 https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113601397729489852 > Akshay Venkt

Terence Tao wrote his comments on this talk here: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113601397729489852 https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113601397729489852 > Akshay Venktesh gave a thoughtful and accessible talk recently entitled "(Re)imagining mathematics in a world of reasoning machines". I particularly liked his highlighting of Davis and Hersh's pithy definition of mathematics (which I had not been previously aware of) as "the study of mental objects with reproducible properties"; it is a nice way to abstract out the most essential features of the diverse universe of mathematical objects (numbers, shapes, functions, etc.) that mathematicians actually study. > (My own personal definition of mathematics is more descriptive than prescriptive: mathematics is what mathematicians do, and mathematicians are the people who study mathmatics. This sounds like a tautologically circular definition, but I think of it more as describing the equations of motion of a stochastic dynamical system, in which breakthroughs in mathematics attract more attention by mathematicians, which in turn redefines the relative weighting of different fields of mathematics.)