Terence Tao warns that the proliferation of AI problem-solving is plunging the discipline of mathematics into a crisis

Nov 2

1. 15:19

   cnBeta

   Terence Tao on the Crisis Facing Mathematics as a Discipline After AI Conquers Mathematical Problems

   In a lecture at Caltech, Terence Tao said that after AI successively conquered the Erdős problems, the Jacobian conjecture, and even the Navier-Stokes problem, the mathematics community has moved from a scarcity of proofs to a flood of proofs, with vast numbers of AI papers lacking derivation details overwhelming journals. He mentioned that OpenAI's solving of the Navier-Stokes problem within a week sparked an authorship controversy and prompted him to jointly publish an open letter with 25 Fields Medalists, warning that problem-solving and insight are becoming decoupled. He believes the most urgent issue is how to train graduate students, because topics that once took months to work through can now be solved by AI in a few hours.

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2. 15:19

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3. 09:43

   Phoenix Technology

   Millennium Prize math problem solved by AI, Terence Tao says the entire discipline is facing a crisis

   A New Yorker feature documented the shockwaves AI brought to the pure mathematics community in 2026: OpenAI announced it had cracked the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, models such as GPT-5.2 Pro and Claude Fable 5 successively solved multiple Erdős problems and the Jacobian conjecture, and in early October OpenAI released new results on 372 unsolved math problems. Terence Tao and 25 other Fields Medalists jointly published an open letter warning that problem-solving and insight are becoming decoupled, that a flood of AI papers lacking derivation details is overwhelming journals, and that graduate student training has also been hit because AI can solve medium-level problems in a few hours. The report also mentioned that Anthropic refused to disclose the derivation process for a new solution to the Hadamard matrix problem, as well as the dispute between OpenAI and New York University professor Buckmaster over priority and authorship regarding the Navier-Stokes problem.

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