Po-Shen Loh on Terence Tao's blog: why AI-era math still needs human mathematicians
stevenstrogatz · x · 2026-09-20
- Terence Tao's blog carries a guest post by Po-Shen Loh, "Why Do We Need Human Mathematicians Anymore?", amid turmoil after OpenAI claimed a Millennium Prize variant of Navier-Stokes.
- Mathematicians have mobilized: the Leiden Declaration has 4,000+ signatories, Math and AI 7,000+, and an open letter against the Caltech Mathathon 2,000+.
- Loh's axiom: humans should help humanity flourish; as AI creates more "control points," experts must oversee them and keep doing research to steer them.
- A vocal minority from tech/economics argues mathematicians should adapt and cede control.
- Relatedly, Grant Sanderson proposes "open exposition problems" rewarding making math genuinely understandable. The post's prose was written by Loh with no AI; the page layout used Claude Code.
Related event: Po-Shen Loh on Terence Tao's Blog: Why We Still Need Human Mathematicians(4 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Agents' bottleneck isn't intelligence but goal commitment — and that's good for alignment — mimi10v3 · 2026-11-12
- Google Cloud survey: 78% say legacy enterprise vendors may not lead the AI era — rseroter · 2026-11-12
- Safety researchers blast OpenAI/Anthropic plan: automating alignment research with possibly misaligned AI — trevposts · 2026-11-12
- NYT essay: resisting Big Tech and AI takes collective action, not willpower — TuhinChakr · 2026-11-12
- Ethan Mollick: 'talk to your documents' RAG solutions already feel dated — emollick · 2026-11-12
- Anthropic's pitch hasn't changed in 5 years: 'AI is winner-take-all, we will build god' — menhguin · 2026-11-12