#Prodigy Terence Tao: AI brings the 'romance' of mathematics to an end

Professor Terence Tao of UCLA believes that the "romantic era" of mathematics is ending when AI can solve difficult problems with just a few hints.

"We are entering an industrial age, where mathematics becomes popular, there are new and interesting things that can happen, but some of the romance is being lost," Professor Terence Tao, famous mathematics expert at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) shared in the Numberphile postcast last weekend.

According to Professor Tao, mathematics is gradually losing its inherent characteristics with excellent individuals who can spend many years pursuing a problem. He mentioned British mathematician Andrew Wiles once spent 7 years living in isolation in the attic to solve a single difficult equation.

"In the past, finding a solution to a difficult problem required knowledge, experience and a long research process. Today, AI can create a series of proofs in a short time," he said.

According to UCLA experts, technology helps speed up research progress, but chasing the number of proven theorems, performance and published achievements risks impairing the ability to understand the nature of the problem. AI also makes the community concerned about the source of problems for graduate students and young scientists, when systems can solve a series of problems that are used to train the next generation of researchers.

"This situation resembles the transition from a period of shortage to a surplus of synthetic foods: supply increases but the value and experience are no longer the same," he continued.

According to the professor, the biggest challenge is not simply how many problems AI can solve, but how to help people continue to understand, verify and control the results generated by the machine. From there, he proposed that the mathematics community switch to collaborative projects, maintaining learning and practicing learning using traditional methods before depending on AI tools.

Professor Terence Tao's comments were made in the context of AI being able to quickly find solutions to a series of difficult problems - something that experts have not had an answer to for many years. In early October, OpenAI published 722 manuscripts containing 372 mathematical results, claiming to have made progress on hundreds of open problems. However, just one day later, the company had to withdraw three drafts due to errors discovered, and at the same time edit 14 other drafts.

According to Business Insider, many mathematicians criticized the speed and scale of this announcement, saying that the results need to be carefully verified, clearly explained and previous work properly acknowledged. The Mathematical Humanities Association with more than 800 members also issued a protest notice, saying this does not actually promote mathematics forward, and even called for a boycott of OpenAI. In September, 25 mathematicians who received the Fields Medal signed an open letter, arguing that the mass "dumping" of mathematical research could harm the field, disrupting the process of research and knowledge transmission.

Meanwhile, some experts say companies like OpenAI disrupt the work of young mathematicians. "Our entire research program was wiped out due to their indiscriminate dumping," Professor Tristan Buckmaster at New York University told CNBC in early October, after OpenAI announced the results of the math solution.

"We look to the future, but we don't know until we finish our PhD whether there will be a place for graduate school," Caiman Moreno-Earle, a doctoral student at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), told Business Insider.

Terence Tao was born in 1975 in Australia, is a famous mathematician whose research ranges from number theory, harmonic analysis to partial differential equations. He showed his mathematical talent from the age of 2 when he taught math and English to his 5-year-old brother, participated in an international math competition at the age of 11 and received a doctorate from Princeton University at the age of 20. He also received the Fields Medal in 2006, an award considered the Nobel Prize in Mathematics, at the age of 31.

Bao Lam summary

• After mathematics, AI can conquer new heights