Gary Marcus: Fields medalists' letter is about beauty, not cope
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-09-12
Gary Marcus pushes back on mockery of the letter signed by 25 Fields Medalists, saying it is not about "cope" or job security but about beauty and insight: they fear brute-force cherry-picked, mostly incomprehensible proofs (perhaps combined with IP theft) will undermine mathematics the way slop has undermined other fields. He points to Terence Tao's recent Mathstondon posts as context and advises reading them or his excerpts.
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