WORLD VIEW

22 October 2026

As machines race ahead in solving problems, mathematicians must establish a new era that prizes human understanding over simply publishing more solutions.

By

Terence Tao Terence Tao is a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Advanced artificial-intelligence models are transforming mathematics at an astonishing speed. In the past few months, AI-aided proofs — logical arguments that demonstrate why a mathematical result is correct — have been released for hundreds of long-standing maths problems.

Mathematicians might need several months to fully understand the underlying arguments and implications of these automatically derived solutions. As a mathematician who uses AI tools for my own research, I can see that the field has fundamentally transformed.…