September 8, 2026<\/a><\/p>\nUC Berkeley math professor Richard Borcherds, who won the 1998 Fields Medal, a prize considered to be the math equivalent to a Nobel, said he only expected a result of this caliber in 10 years and is surprised at the pace at which AI is improving.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fairly obvious that if things go like this, in a few years, humans doing math research will be redundant,\u201d Borcherds said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to know what advice to give graduate students because the future is \u201cchanging in a rather major way,\u201d he added. Borcherds claimed AI is already better than beginner graduate students.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re starting off as a (graduate) student in math, it\u2019s likely that AI will always be better than you at mathematics,\u201d Borcherds said. \u201cGrad students are not stupid \u2014 this has occurred to all of them, and quite a lot of them are dropping out or getting very worried about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, Robin Huang, who is in the final year of her math Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley, is not convinced of AI\u2019s capabilities just yet. Though she has used AI to aid her own research, she has found it \u201cvery stupid and very inefficient.\u201d<\/p>\n
Huang said she thinks many graduate students and postdocs in math are concerned about job prospects, but she remains optimistic about the future. In fact, in a \u201cperfect vacuum,\u201d she said, if AI\u2019s abilities were to stay the same, she would be able to learn a lot more about mathematics.<\/p>\n
Huang said AI companies\u2019 pursuit of unsolved math problems is an \u201cextremely cynical undertaking\u201d and said she saw AI having a negative impact on the math community. She accused AI companies of turning mathematicians against each other and creating fear about being \u201cscooped,\u201d where another researcher \u2014 or, more recently, an AI model \u2014 publishes results before a rival does.<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s Navier-Stokes solution is currently drawing scrutiny from mathematicians, notably New York University math professor Tristan Buckmaster, who posted a statement on social media alleging that the AI models may have been trained on Buckmaster and his collaborators\u2019 prompts in OpenAI\u2019s Codex. He also alleged OpenAI refused to credit mathematician Levent Alp\u00f6ge due to his ties to rival AI company Anthropic.<\/p>\n
Borcherds remains unfazed by AI and said these advancements make no difference if one enjoys learning math.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are complaining that AI is pushing out this 100,000-line formal proof of some major conjecture. I don\u2019t really see what harm this does because you can always ignore this if you want, and then you\u2019re no worse off than before,\u201d Borcherds said. \u201cI think what people are getting upset about is they\u2019re slowly realizing that they are dumb and somehow blaming this on AI, even though it\u2019s not really AI\u2019s fault.\u201d<\/p>\n
Borcherds, who currently teaches MATH 250A, a graduate-level course on abstract algebra, also said AI would be much better than him at teaching the course. He said AI is more patient and much better at expressing itself than he is and doesn\u2019t get mad when students ask stupid questions.<\/p>\n
Borcherds himself said he has asked AI \u201cdeep mathematical questions\u201d and gets \u201cmuch better answers from it than (he gets) from any human mathematician.\u201d<\/p>\n
Huang tells her students that math is half about communicating with others \u2014 a point Borcherds echoed, as he said nearly everything he has learned about mathematics was taught to him by others. But Borcherds added that it doesn\u2019t \u201c(make) much difference\u201d whether he learns math from AI or from other mathematicians.<\/p>\n
Huang said she believes there is something \u201cdeeply creative\u201d about math, which she argues isn\u2019t true for the lab sciences. Math is about coming up with one\u2019s own perspective of the world, which Huang said AI can\u2019t do.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve told my students that you can, by all means, use AI,\u201d Huang said. \u201cI don\u2019t care if you do your homework or not. But if you don\u2019t do your homework by yourself, you will fail the f— out of the exam.\u201d<\/p>\n
Huang mentioned discussions about the math community\u2019s career incentive scheme being flawed and mathematicians falling victim to the idea that math is about proving big unsolved problems.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe AI companies are able to do this because our community standards and incentives were already wrong,\u201d Huang said. \u201cWe already knew this, and maybe this will be a wake-up call for us. \u2029I\u2019m not saying that I\u2019m confident that everything will change immediately, but I do have faith that we will be able to move past this. \u2026 The other thing is, there are other things in life that make me happy. Even if \u2014 which I do not think will happen \u2014 but, even if (AI) completely takes over math, there are things in life that may not be, and life goes on.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After OpenAI announced its solution to one of mathematics\u2019 most difficult unsolved problems, the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":501150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[2007,19534,2080,194127,194132,23230,194133,194126,194125,194128,143,145,144,3408,194129,194130,194131,149,11931],"class_list":["post-501149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-ai","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-clay-mathematics-institute","tag-codex","tag-fields-medal","tag-levent-alpge","tag-millennium-prize-problems","tag-navier-stokes","tag-noam-brown","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-openai","tag-richard-borcherds","tag-robin-huang","tag-tristan-buckmaster","tag-uc-berkeley","tag-x"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}