Tao's blog hosts Po-Shen Loh essay asking why we still need human mathematicians in the AI era
stevenstrogatz · x · 2026-09-20
Terence Tao's blog crossposted Po-Shen Loh's essay "Why Do We Need Human Mathematicians Anymore?", written after OpenAI claimed a Millennium Prize variant of Navier-Stokes. Protective declarations are surging: the Leiden Declaration has 4,000+ signatures, Math and AI has 7,000+, and an open letter against the Caltech Mathathon has 2,000+.
Loh argues every community should commit to a core value — helping humanity flourish — which reconciles conflicting stances: preserving strong human expert communities in every field, AI creating new value, people adapting to technology, and AI slowing down. He predicts AI will ironically slow because we've just created too many jobs to fill. A note says the prose was 100% written by Loh in vim, while page layout was generated by Claude Code.
Related event: Po-Shen Loh on Terence Tao's Blog: Why We Still Need Human Mathematicians(4 posts)→
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