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Fenner Tanswell

@fennert.bsky.social
489 followers 392 following 512 posts

Philosopher of Mathematics and Logic working at TU Berlin. Also into epistemology, science, Xphi and the philosophy of extinction. Flightfree and carfree. fennertanswell.com

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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The youtube livestream for this will be found here: www.youtube.com/@SorinBangu/...
youtube.com
Sorin Bangu
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
My short viewpoint article "The Enshittification of Mathematics" is out now in the Mathematical Intelligencer! link.springer.com/article/10.1... Gift link here: rdcu.be/5uYGc2uo454a Check it out and share it with anyone who might be interested! 💩🥳
link.springer.com
The Enshittification of Mathematics - The Mathematical Intelligencer
The Mathematical Intelligencer -
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Joel David Hamkins @joeldavidhamkins.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I've posted some information at jdh.hamkins.org/philosophy-a...
jdh.hamkins.org
Philosophy and Logic of Games, Notre Dame, Fall 2026
This is a rough outline syllabus for the class I am teaching this semester at the University of Notre Dame on the philosophy and logic of games. University of Notre Dame        …
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This sounds awesome! Do you have an outline of the course available somewhere?
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
My short viewpoint article "The Enshittification of Mathematics" is out now in the Mathematical Intelligencer! link.springer.com/article/10.1... Gift link here: rdcu.be/5uYGc2uo454a Check it out and share it with anyone who might be interested! 💩🥳
link.springer.com
The Enshittification of Mathematics - The Mathematical Intelligencer
The Mathematical Intelligencer -
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Experimental Philosophy @xphilosopher.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
There has been a huge amount of experimental philosophy research on the concept of KNOWLEDGE This research finds that the ordinary concept doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does A thread with some examples: 🧵
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Do it! You're very welcome!
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emilyriehl.bsky.social @emilyriehl.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
This take, which is more interesting than my own, came out of a discussion last night about my attempts to describe my views on purpose of mathematical research: terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/14/w...
terrytao.wordpress.com
Why I do mathematical research
[This is a guest post by Emily Riehl. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Like many mathematicians, I was drawn to the field as a lit…
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
(DAY 2 cont'd) 16:00-16:45 Sorin Bangu (Bergen) Rule-following and Rule-breaking: How is Mathematical Creativity Possible (in the Age of AI) 17:00-18:15 KEYNOTE Michael Harris (Columbia, NYC) Purity as organizing principle
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
(DAY 2 cont'd) 14:00-14:45 José Pérez-Escobar (Madrid) LLMs and rule-following in mathematics 14:45-15:30 Romain Büchi (Geneva) Conjecturing with AI: A View from Mathematical Practice
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Day 2: Thursday 8th October 9:15-10:30 KEYNOTE Emily Riehl (Johns Hopkins, Baltimore) A new paradigm for mathematical proof? 11:00-11:45 Silvia De Toffoli (IUSS Pavia) After Math 11:45-12:30 Ásgeir Berg (Iceland) Mathematical Understanding in the Time of Astra
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
(DAY 1 cont'd) 16:00-16:45 David Appadourai (Rome) Bidirectionality and the Epistemic Limits of Machine-Verified Proof 17:00-18:15 KEYNOTE Kati Kish Bar On (Boston Univ. and Harvard Business School - AI Institute) Rethinking Mathematical Intuition, Agency, and Practice in the Age of AI
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
(DAY 1 cont'd) 11:45-12:30 Markus Pantsar (RWTH Achen) Trust in mathematical AI systems 12:30-14:00 Lunch 14:00-14:45 Carolin Antos (Konstanz) Notions of (AI)-proofs 14:45-15:30 Michael Friedman (Bonn) Anxiety and Opacity: From AI-generated Proofs to Autoformalization
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Day 1: Wednesday 7th October 9:00-9:15 Welcome by Sorin, Ásgeir, and Fenner 9:15-10:30 KEYNOTE Ursula Martin (Oxford, Edinburgh) The Leiden Declaration on AI and mathematics: roots, reception and reflection. 11:00-11:45 Fenner Tanswell (TU Berlin) On Autoformalisation
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Importantly, the whole thing will be livestreamed, with the link to appear on the website. Full programme below. Do tune in to the talks!
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Next week Wednesday and Thursday (7th and 8th October) we will be running the event "Mathematical Proof in the age of AI" at the University of Bergen. www4.uib.no/en/research/...
www4.uib.no
Mathematical Proof in the Age of AI
This conference will be about the various implications of AI-based proving and autoformalisation for mathematics. Examples include the recently (claimed) major breakthrough in solving the Navier-Stoke...
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Michael Barany @mjb.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026
sitting on loads of counterexamples to major conjectures but honestly I'm not in it for the glory, might leak via various channels that won't be traceable back to me just in case other people would find the results useful
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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
For anyone interested, I talk about this in the discussion section of a forthcoming xphi paper on trust and AI philpapers.org/rec/LANTIA-8
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Casper Albers 🟥 @casperalbers.nl · 21/09/2026
It is indeed a huge amount of work and things can be made more efficient by introducing luck. For many grants a simple lottery is efficient. And, if that's too big of a step, asking for abbridged proposals, funding top 10%/removing bottom 50%, then a lottery on the remaining 40%, works too
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
So I don't think it is strange to pick out this class of proofs that are within reach (and LLMs can find quickly at scale) as an interesting class, as opposed to all math being within reach in some broader theoretical sense.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
I would make an empirical prediction that mathematicians have a robust inter-subjective notion of what counts as maths "within reach of what we have" and genuinely new maths. Probably you could generate some tricky edge cases, but overall I reckon this would hold up.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Ah I see, the idea is that LLMs are recombining known bits to to find proofs that were already within reach (so doxastically justified) and thus turn them into knowledge? Sounds pretty plausible to me. I don't think there has been an unambiguous case yet of something really new.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Why is it from collective doxastic justification to knowledge? A couple of the big results have been the opposite of what experts were expecting (e.g. the unit distance conjecture turned out to have a better solution than the one Erdos had hypothesised).
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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I think the ears point towards the sprout in a wig interpretation.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
www.lawfaremedia.org/article/ais-... A very nice article linking LLMs to the long history of stories where your wishes don't always have their intended effect.
lawfaremedia.org
AIs as Modern Genies
With AI we have built genies. Old stories told us how this goes.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
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Axel Gelfert @agelfert.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Mein erster Gedanke war: "Ach, die Dino-Bots treten auch zur Abgeordnetenhauswahl an? Dabei haben wir für Dinosaurier-Politik doch schon die CDU." #berlinwahl
Foto von Wahlplakaten zur Berliner Abgeordnetenhaus, befestgit an einem Laternenpfahl, von oben nach unten CDU, FDP, Grüne, Volt, SPD, darunter ein Werbeplakat für "Dino-Bots", eine Ausstellung von Dinosaurier-Figuren...
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Ásgeir Berg @asgeirberg.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I thought this was a good time to mention (again) that @fennert.bsky.social and I wrote a paper arguing that using LLMs to generate and verify proofs does not necessarily give us mathematical knowledge as that notion has traditionally been understood: www.mxphi.com/all-issues/v...
mxphi.com
The Philosophical Prospects of Large Language Models in the Future of Mathematics
The Philosophical Prospects of Large Language Models in the Future of Mathematics — Fenner Stanley Tanswell, Ásgeir Berg
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Fintan Mallory @fintanmallory.com · 14/09/2026
Mufasa explains the circle of life but it's the Lotka-Volterra equations
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Ásgeir Berg @asgeirberg.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
My paper on my solution to the rule-following paradox is out in Ergo: doi.org/10.3998/ergo...
doi.org
An Objective Communitarian Account of Semantic Content
Communitarian accounts of semantic content have been widely rejected in the literature on the rule-following paradox and related issues—for good reason. In this paper, I offer a game-theoretic account...
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
"The process is deliberately unhurried, but we will provide updates." www.claymath.org/news/navier-...
claymath.org
Navier-Stokes Announcement - Clay Mathematics Institute
The Millennium Prize Problems were unveiled by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) at a meeting in Paris in 2000 to celebrate “The Universality of Mathematical Thought”. These problems encapsulate so...
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emilyriehl.bsky.social @emilyriehl.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
According to my memory from last night and the wayback machine, OpenAI updated the Navier-Stokes pdf at Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:09:35 GMT. The original version was one page shorter and did not contain any citations to Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa: web.archive.org/web/20260000...
web.archive.org
Wayback Machine
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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
The one upside of this all is that the comments section validated my post's main points repeatedly and with surprising variety.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Major result in formalisation breaking first on a coffee shop's instagram is a new one! www.instagram.com/p/Dc32GtFtzak
instagram.com
Coffee Zee Holloway on Instagram: "The bloke who sits in here every day, trying to prove a theorem he says that AI has beaten him to it."
193 likes, 7 comments - coffeezeeholloway on September 4, 2026: "The bloke who sits in here every day, trying to prove a theorem he says that AI has beaten him to it.".
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Timothy Gowers @wtgowers.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Kevin Buzzard's thoughts on Fermat's Last Theorem being autoformalized in Lean. xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/09/04/f...
xenaproject.wordpress.com
FLT: Anthropic has beaten me to it
I guess technically it was revealed to the world by a coffee shop in Islington on Insta, but an hour later it was officially announced by Anthropic: one of their internal models, using the prove2.m…
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Ethan Landes @ethanlandes.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I wrote a blog post about how experimental philosophy should address the most toxic aspect of analytic philosophy, namely its insistence that any alternative way of doing philosophy is pointless, not rigorous, or not philosophy ethanlandes.com/posts/2026/0...
ethanlandes.com
Experimental philosophers, it’s time to stop calling ourselves analytic philosophers
A few years ago I saw a friend give an experimental philosophy talk at a departmental seminar. During the Q&A, someone in the audience asked the question all of us in experimental philosophy have lear...
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
@deutschebahn.com Toll gemacht, mach weiter so!
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Now on a later train on a different route that is also delayed by 40 minutes, so that I will miss the next connection two hours later anyway.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
First train of the day cancelled, tried to leave an hour early to get an earlier one, but delayed S bahn made me miss that. The later train they suggested also delayed enough to miss the next connection.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Many people believe that Deutsche Bahn runs a train company in Germany. This is, however, a widely held misconception.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I'm getting to teach a seminar on Xphi this autumn. 🥳 What are your favourite Xphi papers? Classics or recent ones appreciated. The more diverse (topics/methods) a selection the better.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I'm getting to teach a seminar on Xphi this autumn. 🥳 What are your favourite Xphi papers? Classics or recent ones appreciated. The more diverse (topics/methods) a selection the better.
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Diversity Reading List in Philosophy @diversityread.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Want to learn more about Feminist Logic? Interested in starting a reading group but not sure where to start? Look no further! The DRL is home to a wealth of reading group blueprints and here, we are spotlighting our blueprint on Feminist Logic! 1/2 #philsky #philosophy #DRL #backtoschool
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
The internet reacts to an improvement in matrix multiplication efficiency from 2.371339 to 2.371177.
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Some top work from the Daily Nous comments section today.
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Michael Barany @mjb.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026
next Greek epic for hollywood treatment needs to be Euclid's Elements. overdue
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Asking for a friend (Alex Rails)
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Fenner Tanswell @fennert.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
But then how do I play the game well?
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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
That would be a fascinating project! As you probably know there is some interesting work around the rhetoric of mathematical proofs: @fennert.bsky.social in particular has looked at how they use imperatives and what this says about the popular idea that proofs are purely deductive in form.
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