Very few people will pay mathematicians to produce as if they were making art. The big problem here is that counting proofs is how mathematicians historically have created legitimacy for the universities they work for. Mathematicians in the past 100 years have been paid solely for the prestige they generate, the work itself is irrelevant to the university. If the prestige signal dies universities will spend less on math departments. Every math professor will be expected to teach undergrads as well as a stable of grad students. That’s the value they are actually able to provide to universities.
> The big problem here is that counting proofs is how mathematicians historically have created legitimacy for the universities they work for
This is a really interesting point. This is almost analogous to a metric in software engineering like lines of code which is a proxy for something we actually want to measure.
In a way, the SOTA model providers are cargo culting what appears to be what mathematics is.
