Kirwin Hampshire emits a cri de coeur in his The Dark Night of Mathematics. He comes across as slightly unhinged with such remarks as :
I am going insane. During the last week or so LLMs have produced a number of counterexamples to significant long-standing conjectures.
and
I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments. I have been screaming internally for days. It feels as though I am living inside of a nightmare.
His piece is nonetheless worth reading. What caught my attention in particular was this observation:
Everything said thus far still sidesteps the emotional core of the issue. Here it is:
There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical.
That admission may come as a surprise to some non-mathematicians. But I would be willing to bet that for any mathematician reading this, what I have said above is quite prosaic—whether or not it accords with their personal experience of mathematics. Here is a brief gesture at the full sweep of mathematical mystics and dreamers: Ramanujan, Grothendieck, Cantor, Pascal, Luzin, Leibniz and possibly you, or someone you know.
I am not a mathematician, but I know some advanced mathematics and have studied set theory, and some of the papers of Georg Cantor. The spiritual thrust of Cantor’s work is undeniable and well-documented by Joseph Warren Dauben in Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (Harvard IP, 1979).