Prodigy Terence Tao: AI Is Ending the 'Romance' of Mathematics

What happened

Terence Tao, a famous math professor at UCLA, said on the Numberphile podcast that math is becoming an "industrial" field. AI can now solve hard problems with only a few hints. He said some of the romance of math is being lost. Before, solving a hard problem took years of work. Now AI can produce many proofs (logical proofs that show a statement is true) in a short time.

Key facts and numbers

• Andrew Wiles spent 7 years working alone in an attic to solve one hard equation.
• In early October, OpenAI published 722 drafts with 372 math results.
• One day later, OpenAI withdrew 3 drafts because of errors and edited 14 more.
• Tao was born in 1975 in Australia. He got his PhD from Princeton at age 20 and won the Fields Medal in 2006 at age 31.

Why people are upset

Many mathematicians criticized the speed and size of OpenAI's release. They say results need careful checking and clear explanations. The Association for Mathematical Humanities, with more than 800 members, called for a boycott of OpenAI. In September, 25 Fields Medal winners signed an open letter warning that flooding the field with research could harm it. Some young researchers also worry that AI is taking away the practice problems used to train the next generation.

Why it matters

The big question is not only how many problems AI can solve. It is whether people can still understand, check, and control what machines produce. If the training problems disappear, young scientists may have fewer chances to learn and to build careers.

What to watch

• Whether OpenAI and other AI companies check their math results more carefully.
• Whether math communities create more team-based projects, as Tao suggests.
• Whether universities keep enough research jobs and training problems for students.