On July 24, the math world’s only true celebrity walked onto its most illustrious stage, to speak to the unprecedented threat that he and his peers are now facing.
Terence Tao is not a dramatic man. He speaks in a soothing voice, often tipping his head down and closing his eyes as he plucks each word with care from some recess of his revered mind. But that evening, several of those words were uncharacteristically grave. His lecture, entitled “Mathematics in the Age of AI,” struck a more foreboding tone than any of his previous comments on the subject. “It is a very confusing mess right now.” Artificial intelligence’s rapid ascent in math research, he said, has created “a crisis in our mathematical values and practices.”
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