Daniel Litt

i’ve already depicted you as lacking all conviction and myself as full of passionate intensity 😏

Yes, we've been figuring this out and childcare is unbelievably expensive.

I’ll meet with them via Zoom (and travel back to Toronto a couple times).

This has been public for a bit but (some personal news) I don't think I've mentioned it on here: I'll be the "Benedict H. Gross Distinguished Visitor" at the Harvard math department for the fall semester.

lol I have not really tried to go into it in detail yet. I think she’s still not really clear on the concept of “death,” quite possible she thinks it’s something like “turned into bones.” E.g. she would also ask what various fossilized creatures are currently feeling.

Lot of very interesting conversations at the museum (hopefully not too traumatic). After we got home toddler explained to my wife that a really big rock hit the earth, but insisted it was no bigger than she could encompass by stretching her arms out.

Toddler: *looking at dinosaur fossils* Did THEY die?
Me: yes, a very long time ago.
Toddler: When I was a BABY?!

Toddler: *gestures at 200m-year-old crustacean fossils at Natural History Museum* How did they die?
Me: I don’t know. Maybe there was some kind of disaster, or they got really old—
Toddler: *stares at me, tears welling up* they died because they got old?

Let my toddler help me crush some garlic earlier (i.e. she held the garlic press with me) and thanked her afterwards, saying she was a big help. She spent the next hour marching up to my wife and me, saying “Can I help with that? I’m STRONG!”

Toddler: “I always finish dinner, sometimes.”

Figured I’d re-up this with an excerpt.

Mathematics in the Library of Babel — Daniel Litt Mathematics isn't only about saying true things. It's about asking the right questions, being confused, stumbling about, getting distracted, being wrong, recognizing when you're wrong, being stuck. Mo...

Some thoughts on AI and math, inspired by “First Proof”: www.daniellitt.com/blog/2026/2/...

I thought this was very insightful. They have tremendous breadth of knowledge but struggle a bit more at depth of reasoning (and depth has grown much more slowly)

How much programming requires IMO Gold or less reasoning, though? I'd say maybe like 75% of my work is

MATHEMATICS IN THE LIBRARY OF BABEL February 21, 2026 Mathematics isn't only about saying true things. It's about asking the right questions, being confused, stumbling about, getting distracted, being wrong, recognizing when you're wrong, being stuck. Mostly being stuck. It's about clinging to a giant edifice and feeling it out until you understand some tiny piece of it. It's about finding meaning in and intuition for the texture of an object which, at first, can only be apprehended by bashing your skull into it until it imprints on your forehead. Then trying to convey some of that insight to someone else, and watching as they find their own way to it. I started trying to get LLMs to do math in July 2020, through the game "AI Dungeon," one of the earliest applications powered by GPT-3. I first got GPT-3 to produce a correct proof (of Fermat's Little Theorem) in April 2022. At the time I did not think they would become useful for math research in the near term.

With alt text (thanks @barbarafantechi.bsky.social!)

Figured I’d re-up this with an excerpt.

Daniel Litt made a great post about the current and future state of AI in math, in which I am also featured.

Recommended read for any and all here!

Thanks, very open to any (arbitrarily critical) comments.

Mathematics in the Library of Babel — Daniel Litt Mathematics isn't only about saying true things. It's about asking the right questions, being confused, stumbling about, getting distracted, being wrong, recognizing when you're wrong, being stuck. Mo...

Some thoughts on AI and math, inspired by “First Proof”: www.daniellitt.com/blog/2026/2/...

Bluesky needs more academic crankery so I can get my @littmath.bsky.social math shitposting all in one convenient location

Toddler, post-museum, refusing to go up to her bath: “I’m art so don’t touch me!”

Toddler on art during recent museum visits:
Left—“They started drawing a house! *matter-of-factly* They’ll finish it tomorrow.”
Right—“That baby’s in a tissue box!”

Yes, I think so.

toddler (on the way to preschool): I can see the CN tower
me: it was too cloudy to see it yesterday. isn’t it nice we can see the whole thing today?
toddler *patiently*: daddy, we can only see the front of it.

…he is still greedy (charging for his story) and oddly concerned with novelty clothing items (while he no longer knits Thneeds, his current outfit has a “secret strange hole in its gruvulous glove.”)

Incidentally “The Lorax” is really one of Seuss’s best. My favorite aspect of it is that the Once-ler’s characterization is very sharp: even though he regrets that his excess led to the destruction of the Truffula trees, …

For the first time she was very concerned by the destruction of the Truffula trees (“they should get more trees!”) and we had a very nice conversation about the ending of the story.

me: *reading “The Lorax”* NOW…thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there's not enough Truffula Fruit to go 'round.
And my poor Bar-ba-loots are all getting the crummies because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies!
toddler: They should get sushi!

Toddler (sitting down in a restaurant she’s never been to): I’ve been here before! When I was little!
Me *dubious*: Really? When?
Toddler *thinks, nods*: When I was medium!

Toddler: I want to do “Lady and the Tramp” all by myself! *sticks both ends of a string of spaghetti in her mouth*

Toddler: I want two apricots, because I’m two-and-a-half. *Pause* When I turn three, I can have three apricots. *Pause, realization* When I turn four, I can have four apricots! When I turn five, I can have FIVE apricots!