Re:Navier–Stokes Lost in Translation
by ted_dunning on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @12:43PM
(#49995292)
Natural language is ambiguous, but the Lean formalization is very well defined and unambiguous.
It's not the form language that is the real problem here. It's the ambiguity on the other side and the extreme difficulty of doing a useful and accurate translation.
This is what I've been wondering about with LLM proofs. Math is logical, but mathematical writing is still natural language: symbols get overloaded, conventions go unstated, and a lot rides on context. So a model can translate a statement into a formal system and prove it, and the proof can check out, while the statement it proved isn't quite the one the mathematician meant. I read this article as a caution that some of the LLM proofs announced so far may not hold up once a human checks what was actually proved. Is that a fair reading?
Edit out vulgarity