Math & AI - Part I

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Math and AI

First, a little background;

I am 82 years old. I got my masters in math in 1950 with courses in analysis and probability but no group theory. Working in insurance, I passed actuarial exams with the self-study methods common for actuaries at the time. I learned to program from IBM seminars (a whole week) and the manuals.

My reading hobby covered such things as Simon and Newell's work on computer problem solving and later the four-color problem, an interest I return to periodically to this day.
My interest in advanced math was recently reignited by The Problem That Couldn't Be Solved which led me to other books including Abel's Proof and Galois Group Theory and books on symmetry (The Monster) and Lie Groups.

I am curious about how much math can be taught to a computer and whether it could follow or even rediscover the proofs in these books. After all, they have been taught high-school geometry and symbolic logic.