buchbrgr

You are very wrong about bio researchers! I am a mathematician who has worked in bioinformatics and, just like we're seeing with a few curiously well-placed-to-obstruct-progress mathematicians, are in it for power, influence, and credit and anything that erodes any of that is bad, bad, BAD!!!

You should have at least looked into the Mathathon, specifically what it was going to be before Tao et al. highjacked it from its organizers, before white knighting for people like this.

I can guarantee he was not paraphrasing Grothendieck and, if you've seen the movie, you'd understand it's not some cynical performative humility either.

You should actually read the article. In addition to that great mask-slip moment I mentioned, you'll see yet another reason why he's malding about OpenAI's Navier-Stokes work and a few other fun Easter eggs!

It's interesting that you mention Grothendieck tho. I don't suspect Tao is much of a fan. No doubt, there are plenty of honest mathematicians of reasonable character, especially of the "problem-solver" and applied variety, that don't exactly worship at the alter of Alexander Grothendieck for reasons that are essential aesthetic or practical, but I would say he's the archetypical mathematician that people like Terence Tao specifically endeavor to gatekeep from contemporary academia and, ultimately, erase from history altogether.

Based on a very recent guest post on his blog by Noah Giansiracusa:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/16/let-the-diners-int...

Tao believes the works of Grothendieck (mostly as written by the mathematicians that became the Bourbaki group), the Bourbaki group, and those that followed are an active liability to their gatekeeping mediocrity cartel in the AI era. So maybe we can look forward to him making all that even more explicit in the near future!

I don't wish that he would have picked a different example or have done anything he's been doing in the last year and a half differently because he's really revealed in a very explicit way who he actually is and has apparently always been:

A devoted gatekeeper who ABSOLUTELY would deny the world a post-abundance future in order to maintain the prestige of his particular career path

Like many in academic math, he's obviously great as an individual researcher but severely lacks the skills, temperament, and character necessary to participate in the other duties his academic position requires (e.g. Dept Chairman) much less extra-curriculars like the politics and the future of AI. And, the signs have probably been there all along.

E.g. I first started thinking this way when I read an interview with him from 2019 in the Princeton Alumni Weekly:

https://paw.princeton.edu/article/mind-mathematician

In response to the "Mozart of Math" nickname, he bafflingly declares "all academics feel for the Salieri character."

Tao basically says he identifies with Salieri because researchers and academics spend their lives developing the high-level expertise needed to perfectly appreciate brilliant breakthroughs, yet the world casts them as mediocrities in comparison to history's absolute anomalies.

It's worth further noting that all of his context on this Mozart / Salieri stuff comes from the 1984 film Amadeus. In that film, Salieri is the villain! He's a gatekeeping loser that actively sabotaged Mozart and Tao happily volunteers that Salieri's his guy for some reason!

E.g. a more recent thing I'd like highlight is one of the "successes" of his Math 2.0 framework he put in his slide deck:

""" "Open exposition problems" as opposed to open research problems: finding motivated explanations of results whose known proofs are currently opaque. (The newly revised Caltech Mathathon is an interesting experiment in this direction.) """

After Tao and his fellow insecure gatekeeping luddites successfully bullied some Caltech grad students into handing over their event to them, he posted the following statement of absolutely pathetic cuckery on his blog claiming it to be the words of those same weak-willed grad students:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/28/joint-statement-ab...

Note that this "newly revised" event isn't just about writing new exposition on AI solutions, it's about a litany of grievances that people like Tao have had about the works of certain people in math that didn't allow themselves to be bullied like the grad student organizers of the Mathathon.

The letter, again which we're supposed to believe the twenty-something year old grad students definitely wrote themselves, specifically mentions not only OpenAI's Navier-Stokes work, but also brings up the Appel–Haken proof of the four color theorem (from the 80s) and Mochizuki's proof of the ABC conjecture (from the 2010s) as unacceptable works that causes their insecurities to flare up and must be defeated by next-gen gatekeeping.

I'm sure I could think of less responsible potential stewards of our inevitable AI future than Tao, but he and the sorts of people he's aligned himself with really should have no place at all in a position like that.