New paper with Josh Lam, about which I'm really excited! I want to try to briefly explain what the point is in this thread.

More mathematicians needed terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/…

To me the biggest risk of AI is brain rot. I have more and more situations like this. Some coworker shares a report on something they did. I read, and find something fishy. I ask about and get no answer. I ask again and I'm told: the agent said that. And no follow up. It's clear form the interaction that they did not read the report they shared. Their brain is not used as it should be. I am not against AI at all (fortunate for something working at NVIDIA). I use AI a lot. But I use it as a tool. I own the result and whenever I see something fishy I ask about its output I force a change if I am not convinced. I wish there was a way to force people to read the AI output they share with others.

I was part of a group that met last week to try to propose recommended changes to the structure of math PhD programs in an age of AI. Our report, together with a collection of related resources, is now available here: cmsa.fas.harvard.edu/aimathp…

after 1 month in Boston, my 3-year-old has started preemptively pinching her nose shut before entering metro elevators

Well worth reading (as with all of Frank’s writing): galoisrepresentations.org/20…

People on this app don't appreciate how well purely human mathematics is doing. People prove major results literally every few weeks, with proofs that are insightful, beautiful, and solve many problems simultaneously. Currently reading this wonderful thing: arxiv.org/pdf/2608.26392

About 40 years ago Siemion Fajtlowicz created Graffiti, a conjecture-generating graph theory computer program. This essay by Fajtlowicz discusses what Erdős thought of this project (and gives some idea what Erdős may have thought of AI). thomasbloom.org/Fajtlowicz.p… 1/

so are you doing like really really long division all the time?

RT @Frances01896069: Around the early 1900s Math underwent a “Cambrian explosion“. Hilbert (and others) felt the need to tame this burst of…

I’d love to read a collection of such accounts by different mathematicians (broadly defined). Some areas (like TCS) are more problem-focused. But even there I think researchers spend their time understanding phenomena and principles that the problems try to capture.

If you could explain what that looks like that isn't *confused looking out the window while muttering under ones breath" then this would be a very interesting piece of writing but no other mathematician has ever managed to do this (that I know of!)

Must come as a surprise to people here that you don't have a list of top 10 open problems in your office as the target to achieve.

More open letters on AIxMath! I’ve decided I (probably) won’t sign any such letters but these are the closest to my views thus far.

Great writing by Martin Hairer, I concur: "The recent releases, on privately controlled websites, of high-profile mathematical results combined with abject levels of scholarship and only minimal presentation effort has been undermining the usual standards of scientific practice. If we refuse to answer when being asked how to do better (irrespective of whether that ask is being done in good faith), how could we then complain about this behaviour?"

I’m not sure. These lists of open problems definitely contain stuff we would like to know, but it’s not like mathematicians were spending their entire time after the millennium problems, say. For example, in the past 15-20 years there have been several breakthroughs in fluid PDEs, I think the area has been reignited by the connection with convex integration found by De Lellis and Szekelyhidi. This is why lots of people were thinking about the millenium problem on Navier-Stokes, it seemed ripe for solution. But the reality is that mathematicians has been pursuing research directions in a more creative and unstructured way than any problem list has ever captured. This idea that math is a list of problems to be solved and then we are done belongs very much to non-mathematical circles

Astonishing how many posts like this there are about Tao, someone with no apparent arrogance who has spent his life sharing his gifts with the world.

ok but wrt this it does sound cool and you should release now

WHAT DO WE WANT? An improved understanding of the arithmetic of isomonodromy foliations. WHEN DO WE WANT IT? Soon.