Timothy Gowers recounts Akshay Venkatesh's quip: "I imagined I read it"
gleech · x · 2026-10-07
Mathematician Timothy Gowers shares a memorable anecdote: while Fields Medalist Akshay Venkatesh explained a result to him, Gowers remarked "you read that [difficult] paper?" Venkatesh replied, "well, I imagined I read it."
Gowers says the answer made a big impression on him — a glimpse into how top mathematicians navigate vast literature by building imagined understanding rather than line-by-line reading.
More from Fun
- Seedance 'Age Is Just a Number' Meme Video With Shared Prompts — techhalla · 2026-10-07
- Meta researcher mocks AI safety figure Jacob Coxon as the Greta Thunberg of AI safety — mjdramstead · 2026-10-07
- Reasoning tokens reportedly wasted repeating "Redword" across samples — cis_female · 2026-10-07
- Dev complains: AI coding agents are 'conservative as hell' on production work — alexmacgregor__ · 2026-10-07
- Creator makes 'AI model release cycle' video entirely with Opus 5.5 and Suno — techartist_ · 2026-10-07
- Asked to film 'the meaning of life', Claude Opus 5.5 delivered something eerily human — char-gen · 2026-10-07