The Fall of the Theorem Economy

David Bessis argues that the most valuable contribution of mathematics is not theorems themselves, but the conceptual frameworks and language that make them intelligible. He illustrates this through personal examples, noting that his best mathematical ideas were never formally published because the hard work lay in developing the right definitions and intuitions rather than in proving the results. Bessis suggests that as AI becomes capable of producing theorems, the true value of human mathematics—clarity and understanding through novel conceptual structures—will remain irreplaceable.