Terry Tao is teaching math how to collaborate
The world's greatest living mathematician used a proof-verification tool to break a massive problem into pieces — then let hundreds of people solve them simultaneously.
Terry Tao is teaching math how to collaborate
The world's greatest living mathematician used a proof-verification tool to break a massive problem into pieces — then let hundreds of people solve them simultaneously.
Mathematics Distillation Challenge – Equational Theories
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/03/13/mathematics-distillation-challenge-equational-theories/
#HackerNews #Mathematics #Distillation #Challenge #Equational #Theories #TerryTao #MathChallenge
Mathematical Exploration and Discovery at Scale
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/11/05/mathematical-exploration-and-discovery-at-scale/
#HackerNews #Mathematics #Exploration #Discovery #Scale #TerryTao
Decomposing a Factorial into Large Factors
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/03/26/decomposing-a-factorial-into-large-factors/
#HackerNews #Decomposing #a #Factorial #into #Large #Factors #mathematics #factorials #algorithms #numbertheory #TerryTao
The second part of Grant Sanderson's video interview with myself on the cosmic distance ladder is now out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFMaT9oRbs4 I wrote a blog post with additional commentary and corrections on both videos at https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/02/13/cosmic-distance-ladder-video-with-grant-sanderson-3blue1brown-commentary-and-corrections/
Inquiry Into Inquiry • On Initiative 4
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2023/05/15/inquiry-into-inquiry-on-initiative-4/
Re: Terry Tao • PCAST Working Group on Generative AI Invites Public Input
• https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2023/05/13/pcast-working-group-on-generative-ai-invites-public-input/
My Comment —
• https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2023/05/13/pcast-working-group-on-generative-ai-invites-public-input/#comment-678057
I think a lot of people who've been working all along on AI, intelligent systems, and computational extensions of human capacities in general are a little distressed to see the field cornered and re‑branded in the short‑sighted, market‑driven way we currently see.
The more fundamental problem I see here is the failure to grasp the nature of the task at hand, and this I attribute not to a program but to its developers.
Journalism, Research, and Scholarship are not matters of generating probable responses to prompts or other stimuli. What matters is producing evidentiary and logical supports for statements. That is the task requirement the developers of recent LLM‑Bots are failing to grasp.
There is nothing new about that failure. There is a long history of attempts to account for intelligence and indeed the workings of scientific inquiry based on the principles of associationism, behaviorism, connectionism, and theories of that order. But the relationship of empirical evidence, logical inference, and scientific information is more complex and intricate than is dreamt of in those reductive philosophies.
#Peirce #Logic #Inquiry #InquiryDrivenSystems #InquiryIntoInquiry
#TerryTao #PCAST #AI #IntelligentSystems #LLM #LargeLanguageModels