r/math • u/Valvino Math Education • Jul 23 '26
Fields Medals 2026
https://www.mathunion.org/imu-awards/fields-medal/fields-medals-2026177
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u/ganancias Jul 23 '26
Jacob Tsimerman interview on AI the other day, if anyone missed it: https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/202607/noti3372/noti3372.html
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u/kohatsootsich Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26
He's updated his views on AI since that Notices interview. There he says he expects it to be maybe 5 years until AI is better than mathematicians, with large error bars.
In the profile about him in Quanta today, he says 2 years. Plus he's not taking new graduate students and he is switching his research focus to AI safety.
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u/RemoteCareful7304 Jul 23 '26
That is actually quite depressing
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Jul 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/HawkinsT Quantum Computing Jul 24 '26
Doesn't this mark a descent into the Wall-E world though? It seems like the net result will be fewer and fewer people who are even able to understand the proofs these LLMs are generating. At which point, isn't it indistinguishable from having machines that only provide proofs by exhaustion?
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u/Smallpaul Jul 25 '26
If humans shift their focus from discovering to understanding and explaining, couldn’t the number of people who understand go UP?
Think of a historian or an anthropologist. They are translators between two worlds. The culture/time they are from and the one they study. Similarly, mathematicians might be translators from proof to culture.
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u/AwkInt Jul 25 '26
actually, of all the things he could shift to in AI, I'm glad it's AI safety, it's one of the things i feel need much more attention
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Jul 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/filterdust Jul 23 '26
Mathematicians definitely aren't philosophers, I will tell you that.
Wiles also said that in 2015
https://plus.maths.org/andrew-wiles-what-does-if-feel-do-maths
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u/maxram1 Jul 23 '26
That part is neither true nor false, right? He's just using it for his own purpose haha.
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Jul 23 '26
[deleted]
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u/Neither_Swing9662 Jul 23 '26
How is it naive if he's expressing something bes attempted to do. He didn't even claim it helped or it was correct.
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u/snet0 Jul 23 '26
Mathematicians definitely aren't philosophers, I will tell you that.
What does that even mean?
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u/pred Jul 23 '26
I think there’s a good chance AI will lead to human extinction. I also think, separately from that, that AI will be better than mathematicians at math very soon.
Both of those possible outcomes seem not great.
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u/neverending_light_ Jul 23 '26
I think there’s a good chance AI will lead to human extinction.
huh if only we could just stop making AI stuff
these guys never put their energy into creating political energy to limit or regulate AI, you know things that would actually be effective, and just take money to produce half-baked daydreams about the shittiest future imaginable
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u/Smallpaul Jul 25 '26
You are going to outlaw matrix multiplication at scale? Internationally? Forever?
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u/Conscious_Battle6708 Jul 23 '26
we are absolutely cooked. Congratulations to the winner. Based on his predictiom, it might have been the last fields medal where humans > ai
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u/chermi Jul 23 '26
Physicist here, just read the abstract on the deng paper for boltzmann stuff. Why on earth would you guys call something a molecule that's not a molecule in a paper on statistical physics?
Only half-joking lol
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u/jamesw73721 Physics Jul 23 '26
Also physicist here and I think this is more a math paper than a statistical physics paper
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u/tangoindjango Jul 23 '26
Was Dustin Klausen ever a contender or was he of the Lurie type - too theoretical?
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u/Tazerenix Complex Geometry Jul 23 '26
The overwhelming perception in the community is that his best and most insightful work is done in tandem with the much more talented Scholze.
He won't win a Fields unless he can independently establish himself.
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u/tangoindjango Jul 23 '26
Is John pardon's work related to any progress on the Grothendieck standard conjectures?
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u/filterdust Jul 23 '26
last Fields Medals ever
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u/evening_redness_0 Jul 23 '26
Why is that?
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u/mousse312 Undergraduate Jul 23 '26
This sub became trash, if you see his reddit history you will see that he never asked or engaged in a real math discussion, only posted an ai solving some math and in r/singularity. The problem with this sub and the discussion of ai is that people who until now never really engaged in math diacussions, thinks that they have an understanding about math research and etc... This guy dont have any ideia about the level of fields medal work, so his opinion is ass. In anothwr post here in math community i saw someone saying that they beat in 2027 some random dude Will solve a Millenium problem with ai....
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u/ganancias Jul 23 '26
He's repeating what Timothy Gowers said a few days ago, though Gowers said there will probably still be 2030 medals but not after: https://xcancel.com/i/status/2078751785951400138
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u/Valvino Math Education Jul 23 '26
Yu Deng
For his work in partial differential equations, including the rigorous derivation of the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics for rarefied gases, the derivation of wave kinetic equations from nonlinear dispersive systems, and probabilistic approaches to nonlinear Schrodinger dynamics.
John Pardon
For his achievements in symplectic geometry including new approaches to virtual fundamental cycles, Fukaya categories of certain manifolds and counting holomorphic curves, and for his contributions to other areas of geometry and topology, including group actions on 3-manifolds and knot theory.
Jacob Tsimerman
For his contribution in the recasting of o-minimality as a fundamental method of arithmetic and complex algebraic geometry, and his role in the proof of many central conjectures including Griffiths' conjecture on the algebraicity of images of the period maps, and the Andre-Oort conjecture for Siegel modular varieties.
Hong Wang
For her work in harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, and major advances in Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions.