Professeur de mathématiques à @USherbrooke. Géométrie/dynamique.
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the world's 15 largest cities lie on the intersection of a cubic surface with the earth, weirdly.
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J-P retweeted
I think I should write something about what the day-to-day work of a mathematician actually looks like. We're not out here doing problem sets!
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The recent math discourse reflects something that's been bugging me about science journalism and popularization for a long time.
When people from other sciences want to write for a general audience, they will usually spend most of their time talking about the *purpose* of
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From my point of view, this almost feels like cheating. We've never had the luxury of being able to do that in math, because we're further away from applications, but also because the questions themselves often require years of training to even understand.
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J-P retweeted
Without commenting on the correctness of this claim, I want to briefly say a few words about what it would mean in practice.
Chess is supportable as a hobby in part because one can pick up the rules of chess in an afternoon. While one can't quickly play at a high level, it is relatively easy to appreciate the game, and have fun at it.
Research math is not like this. Over the last decades we have made incredible progress understanding basic concepts (number, shape, etc.) but the edifice we have built to do so requires an incredible time investment. Learning the ideas that go into proving, or understanding the proof of, basic statements like Fermat's last theorem requires years of institutional support.
It's possible that soon, AI will be able to do work at this level; despite recent successes, this isn't the case yet. But even if it can do this, why would it? Without people who care about these deep but fundamental ideas, who will ask it to? Perhaps it might on its own, or a person asking it to "do some cool math" might elicit a similarly deep idea, but who would understand it, if doing so requires years of unsupported work?
In practice, turning pure math into a hobby means the end of pure math, and the end of people who understand basic mathematical concepts at a deep level. Whether this is something we want is something we'll have to decide together.
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J-P retweeted
24 Fields Medalists speak out against "A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics"
mathandai.org/
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J-P retweeted
About Mathathon: undergrads at Caltech are organizing a 40 hour event where participants can use $2M API credits, sponsored mostly by AI companies, to work on open math problems. Recently this event received strong pushback, and below I share my thoughts.
mathathonchallenge.com/
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I basically agree with everything in the text of this open letter, but I don't think that trying to cancel the event is the right move.
It feeds into the narrative that the community is afraid, weak, and that academics mainly want to protect their status.
proofsandprompts.com/2026/09…
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(at least, not by itself considering everything else that's happening)
In fact, I can pretty easily imagine the opposite scenario, where nothing of much substance gets done and the "advertising campaign" aspect of the mathathon completely fails.
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J-P retweeted
ai is starting to show how dumb human mathematicians are—all their conjectures are turning out to be false
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And then I write
By morning, night,
And afternoon,
And pretty soon
My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed,
When he finds out I publish first.
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I don't understand the big distinction that's being drawn between "learning math" and "doing research".
To me, learning and understanding is like 95% of the process. If you learn a bunch of math, you might be able to contribute some results a side effect.
Regardless of any institutional revolutions there is simply no way to avoid a civilization scale loss of the technical skills for doing traditional mathematical research. The reason is simple:
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J-P retweeted
ZIZEK:that AI will be the death of mathematics & so on; to this, I say NO! My employee brings me his proof, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my digestion AI, & we are free! While the 'proving' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to do maths as we please
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