https://unlocked.microsoft.com/ai-anthology/terence-tao/
" I expect, say, 2026-level AI, when used properly, will be a trustworthy co-author in mathematical research, and in many other fields as well.
Then what? That depends not just on the technology, but on how existing human institutions and practices adapt. How will research journals change their publishing and referencing practices when entry-level math papers for AI-guided graduate students can now be generated in less than a day—and with the far better accuracy of future AI tools? How will our approach to graduate education change? Will we actively encourage and train our students to use these tools?
We are largely unprepared to address these questions. There will be shocking demonstrations of AI-assisted achievement and courageous experiments to incorporate them into our professional structures. But there will also be embarrassing mistakes, controversies, painful disruptions, heated debates, and hasty decisions."
He's pretty damn smart that guy.
I've never been able to find that article as an adult, but I would love to know who wrote it.
Gina Kolata allegedly in the New York Times in 1996 on the Robbins conjecture (noting that computers had started to contribute to math research in some sense), and a longer piece in Math Horizons by her the following year ("Computer Math Proof Shows Reasoning Power"). I didn't immediately find the NYT article, so I don't know if it might be a hallucination.
John Horgan in Scientific American in 1993 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-death-of-proo...). There's also a retrospective on the topic by the same author in Scientific American in 2022 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/should-machines-r...).
Natalie Wolchover in Quanta (but reprinted in Wired) in 2013 (https://wired.com/2013/03/computers-and-math).
I was involved in some distributed computing stuff in the late 1990s and early 2000s and I don't really remember people in that community talking about proofs but there may have been a "if we had a mechanical proof-checker, could we do distributed searches for valid proofs that it would accept?" conversation somewhere at some point. There were definitely volunteer distributed computing projects working on pure math; I remember the Optimal Golomb Ruler search (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_ruler). So, that could possibly have shaded over into "can we find proofs this way too?". At the time it probably would have been based on brute force searches through proof space rather than clever optimization, though.
The idea that you can lexicographically list all proofs in some formalism and then mechanically determine if any is valid is quite clear from Gödel's construction of the function Bew in "On Formally Undecidable Propositions", but he points out that you don't know where to stop because you don't know how long a valid proof would potentially have to be (so "is this a valid proof of this claim?" can be decided mechanically in a limited time, while "is there any valid proof of this claim?" can't be! maybe the shortest valid proof is 49 steps long but you eventually stopped checking after looking at all 7-step proofs, or something).
The article I'm remembering was not just about mathematics, but indeed all of physics and related fields. I believe it speculated that eventually distributed computing models could essentially take the world's mathematics and physics formulas and various datasets that we believe to be accurate with high degrees of confidence, and then look for patterns or trends, and then from those trends, mathematicians and physicists would be able to investigate further. Not dissimilar to Folding@Home and SETI@Home.
Keep in mind, that this is the best I can remember from 30 years ago, and I've thought about it so frequently that I am certainly misremembering some of the details. Anyways, it's always been this really compelling possibility, and I wish I could find that article that inspired me so long ago and re-read it! :) I really think it was Wired, but it's possible it was Popular Mechanics, or even an expert guest on TechTV who gave an interview. Hard to say for sure, but I've always thought it was a Wired article.
Appreciate your help though!
Edit: with the noun-noun compounding being different from the usual interpretation here, like "scientists who are computers" rather than "scientists who study computation"! Maybe "computerized scientists" or something.
Only after a world's worth of experts look at these results and then mull over if and how their own fields are impacted by this new info will we be able to answer this question.
I'm reminded of a great TV Show, James Burke's Connections. Where discoveries in one area of science would revolutionize or fundamentally change a completely different area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ&list=PL5HjoPOFFC...
It can take decades to really know the full significance. You know, the whole "We stand on the shoulders of Giants", well the Giants just grew a few inches all at once.
with non-polynomial side being represented as the frontend programmer's constant need for more performance to do the same task...
Non-deterministic can be explained in several ways. One is in terms of a hypothetical "nondeterministic Turing machine" with certain non-physically realizable properties. The easier way is that a NP problem gets as input not only the problem instance x, but a "witness" w, that may depend on the problem instance. This witness generally makes the problem of deciding the problem instance straightforward (e.g. for SAT, x is the SAT instance, and w is a description of how to set the variables so that it is true).
Whomever is running this simulation, please.
See also: noneuclidian geometry and axiom of choice.
It would also be amusing to annihilate nearly six decades of proofs that assume P!=NP.
As long as we also get low order polynomial solutions to important problems, it'll be worth it.
Besides, unencrypted wifi was funny.
Can you help me understand why? Or is this a wry joke?
I'm not an llm, I promise
https://github.com/openai/math/tree/main/preprints/The-Quasi...
I thought it was interesting that it said "This paper was written with human assistance", unlike this other Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis preprint that didn't have the same disclaimer.
https://github.com/openai/math/tree/main/preprints/The-Quasi...
But yeah, this is still a very big deal. Among other things, it will drastically improve all sorts of Rosser-Schoenfeld type results for the PNT and that's just a start. For comparison, I have a paper form 2018 where this result would cut 3 pages out and make the full result cleaner and much tighter, and there are likely hundreds of papers like this.
As for Riemann's memoir, it's hard to compare. You could argue that was "just" noticing a connection (between number theory and Fourier analysis) that nobody had noticed before; in fact this is the kind of thing AI is extremely good at. I'm being a little cute here.
I think if a human had proven just these two results in the form of a uniform zero-free region for L(s,chi) from nothing as OpenAI did it would not be unfair to say that it would be the single greatest advance in math (easily dwarfing Wiles' FLT), and it would instantly put them in the ranks of greatest mathematicians of all time. Unlike something like Navier Stokes there wasn't a semblance of a research program, experts basically considered this hopeless and would have said the chance of seeing a proof in our lifetime was near zero.
For some comparison, Yitang Zhang's bounded gaps result might have gotten him a Fields Medal if he was not disqualified by age. When it was floated that he might have proven Siegel zeros don't exist, it was considered (by experts) clearly a much bigger deal. This result blows that out of the water (it's a way better version); at least analytic number theorists I talked to thought it was plausible but unlikely that Siegel zeros would be eliminated in our lifetime but thought RH was basically hopeless.
Did you mean to not qualify that? That is a bold statement indeed.
I guess the biggest news are not the discoveries themselves but how they were found and that math is going through the biggest revolution as a field since almost ever.
It seems to me less than PNT in terms of what can we actually do with this. Many different areas of math use PNT, and from my standpoint, PNT is helpful not just for what it implies directly but because it lets us make really good heuristics about whether some sets are infinite or not, and what their rough size is. (Granted, one can do that also mostly via Chebyshev). For those purposes, this doesn't really enter in. Similarly, PNT feels like a statement at least I can say explain to my mother without any technical details. This isn't that. But that may also be my own biases of wanting things to cash out to very concrete statements about the integers.
I agree that one striking element is how no one saw this coming. This isn't building on an existing research program, which itself is remarkable. And last night, before I went to bed, I saw a conversation between a bunch of analytic number theorists who seemed to think there was potentially some slack in the quasi-RH argument, which if that's the case means this is going to go even further.
1830 Dirichlet's result is qualitative only, it shows infinitude but not the asymptote in terms of the zeros for it predates Riemann.
To me this is the first substantial step after the 1896 PNT, and we really do not see much progress in the whole 20th century. Personally so far there are only two people worth mentioning,
- Euler, introduces the real zeta function and Euler product, establishes the functional equation at (half?) integers.
- Riemann, introduces complex analysis ideas to the zeta function.
And of course this result if it is true. This is first to penetrate the critical strip, which nobody had any idea how to approach for over a century and a half.
At least put a disclaimer for the ad for this site, and maybe disclose how you came up with a total ordering for "top" open problems (vibes)?
> How problems are ranked. LLMs compare pairs of problems. A reliability-weighted model combines those judgments into the ranking, with calibration across model families. The model-family weights are OpenAI 1.00, Claude 1.00, GLM 0.95, and DeepSeek 0.90. These are modeling choices, not measured probabilities of correctness.
+----------------------------------------------------+------+---------+-----------------+
| Category | Full | Partial | Matched / total |
+----------------------------------------------------+------+---------+-----------------+
| Geometry and topology | 25 | 7 | 32 / 74 |
| Algebra, representation and category theory | 17 | 2 | 19 / 53 |
| Analysis and PDE | 11 | 6 | 17 / 40 |
| Number theory and arithmetic geometry | 4 | 13 | 17 / 117 |
| Probability, ergodic theory and dynamics | 11 | 5 | 16 / 37 |
| Combinatorics and discrete geometry | 7 | 2 | 9 / 34 |
| Theoretical computer science | 4 | 4 | 8 / 57 |
| Mathematical physics | 5 | 1 | 6 / 19 |
| Applied and computational mathematics | 2 | 2 | 4 / 8 |
| Quantum information and computation | 2 | 1 | 3 / 17 |
| Cryptography, coding, information and optimization | 1 | 1 | 2 / 26 |
| Logic, foundations and set theory | 1 | 1 | 2 / 18 |
+----------------------------------------------------+------+---------+-----------------+
| Total | 90 | 45 | 135 / 500 (27%) |
+----------------------------------------------------+------+---------+-----------------+There's also one that says that forced Navier-Stokes can implement universal computation (so, is Turing complete). I don't think any of these are resolving open problems per se, but they're interesting for other reasons.
The highest ranked would be:
| 22 | Hilbert’s tenth problem over ℚ |
| 29 | Unique Games |
| 31 | Anderson-model extended states |
| 37 | Spacetime Penrose inequality |
| 48 | Nonexistence of Landau–Siegel zeros |
| 52 | Baum–Connes |
| 78 | Abundance |
| 80 | Hadwiger |
| 87 | Bose–Einstein condensation |
| 92 | Two-dimensional entanglement area law |