Terence Tao on how new tools flatten math's difficulty landscape while expanding its frontiers
burny_tech · x · 2026-09-09
Terence Tao offers a metamathematical take on how a field's difficulty landscape evolves: every advance — technique, technology, or infrastructure such as searchable libraries of past literature — lowers the difficulty of solving problems. That's generally good, but it flattens the landscape until you can no longer discern its geometry or extract promising questions within a tool's applicability. The counterweight: such tools enlarge the radius of plausibly reachable results, creating new boundaries worth exploring.
Related event: Terence Tao: New Tools Flatten Mathematics' Difficulty Terrain(2 posts)→
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