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- Terence Tao, now a UCLA professor, earned his doctorate in mathematics at 20.
- The prodigy said his work is changing in the age of AI.
- With AI tools doing the legwork, math is no longer "heroic," Tao said.
AI is upending mathematics. For one top professor, the issue is just as spiritual as it is practical.
Terence Tao, a renowned professor at UCLA, said in a recent podcast appearance that the "romantic era" of math is over, thanks to AI tools capable of solving hundreds of problems with some simple prompting.
Now, he said, even leading scholars like him are reduced to sorting through reams of AI-generated proofs, instead of doing the "heroic" solving themselves.
"We are moving to an industrial era where math will become much more large-scale," Tao said in an interview this week on Numberphile, a YouTube channel dedicated to math.
"We are entering an era where exciting new things are possible, but some things are being lost," he added.
OpenAI began its brusque push into the field by solving the Navier-Stokes equation in early September, one of math's millennium problems.
The revelation that AI had cracked it caused consternation from many a math geek. Some mathematicians also expressed frustration that while the AI model might have solved the problem, it didn't show its work, leaving them with the less celebratory task of verifying it.
Then, earlier this month, OpenAI said it cracked another 700 outstanding problems. A math professor at New York University told CNBC that the company's release had derailed work by early-career mathematicians.
"We've had whole research programs wiped out on Tuesday by their dump," the professor, Tristan Buckmaster, said at the time.
In a separate brouhaha in September, OpenAI backed out of a sponsorship for a so-called AI "mathathon" — an event organized by undergraduates at Caltech, where participants were encouraged to use AI to solve equations — after complaints from a group of more senior academics.
Event organizers told Business Insider at the time that their professors were sorely out of touch with the field's trajectory.
"We look to the future, and we don't even know if there's going to be grad school open positions by the time we get to Ph.D," one organizer, Caiman Moreno-Earle, said.
Though OpenAI has said it is taking steps to ensure human academics retain their role in this new era, some researchers and professors are already forecasting their possible obsolescence.
Tao isn't as much of a doomer as some of his colleagues in the field. However, he did say in the interview that the stories math nerds tell themselves may not mean so much in the future.
"We have these sort of mythological stories," he said in reference to the tale of Sir Andrew Wiles, who famously spent seven years isolated in his attic solving a single difficult equation.
"There was something romantic about sort of the heroic age," Tao said.