We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians
- ID
- 28928
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 26 Sep 2026, 10:46 AM
- Fetched
- 26 Sep 2026, 11:15 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/24/were-gonna-need-a-lot-more-mathematicians/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 4.0
- Created
- 26 Sep 2026, 11:15 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learners
What happened
A guest post by Amit Sahai on Terence Tao's blog, published 24 September 2026, argues that the AI systems he has worked with are already producing 'beautiful new ideas' in mathematics, not just fast calculations, and that the research community is entering 'a time for humility' where everyone will know what it feels like to be unable to keep up. He compares this to students who quit research maths because they could not match the pace of top peers, and asks whether today's mathematicians will react the same way. The Hacker News thread drew 228 points and 314 comments.
Why it matters
Nothing in this excerpt changes what a builder should ship this week: it is an opinion essay with no tools, benchmarks, model names, or numbers beyond the publication date and the HN thread's 314 comments. The one concrete decision it surfaces is about review capacity, not idea generation - if AI output in your team is growing faster than the number of people who can judge it, the essay's framing (who keeps up, who leaves) is the question you will face, but it offers no method for it. The excerpt is also truncated before the argument implied by the title, so do not cite it as evidence for a specific 'we need N more mathematicians' claim.
Discussion angle
The essay's evidence is 'the AI systems I have worked with are already producing beautiful new ideas' - ask the room what would count as falsifiable evidence for that, versus fast calculation plus a confident write-up, and whether anyone has seen AI-generated work in their own domain that survived human review unchanged.