alt Hacker NewsI respected Terence Tao but since listening to his "Mathematics in the age of AI" talk, I've become a fan. I have had nobody else explain so succinctly what is the purpose of Mathematical research, why it matters, and why it is so important to preserve the ways we do math. Even more importantly, I feel it resonates so well with every other field AI is taking over.
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SMEbooop • yesterday at 10:49 PM
Yeh; I mean he's still just a dude, not gonna glaze him, but IMO early public ed should really just focus on math and basic physical experiment design for kids
Save specialization in other fields for later in life. Most fields jargon are bolted on top the physical geometry, color gradient, and additive/subtractive behavior in the natural world anyway.
I also loved this talk (went through printed version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49362728)
Tao talks how this has become even more valuable in maths: understanding, verification, exposition, community judgment, synthesis and canonicalization given how proof generation has become easy (which has historically been considered most valuable). So I just mapped this to coding also in my expereience and broader industry sentiment. Code generation was always the hardest and most valuable part. Now that is the cheapest part with claude code and other AI tools. But taking the candidate output (code) and building harness around it like verification, exposition, human understandability have become all the more important. Not just generate code, but generate code that other engineers can confidently modify and extend. Or even better - generate reusable canonical abstractions that improve codebase.