impendia

Booking online may well be difficult.

But having traveled around Japan extensively, I've had a very easy time buying train tickets in person, at the station. You can buy in advance if you want, but I've rarely had any need; just go, and buy a ticket for the next train.

So I guess I'm not too surprised to see that the website design is crappy: it's an afterthought.

Musk has given something like $300M in political donations to support Republicans in the upcoming midterms -- and I've seen quite a lot of media coverage of this.

Much of this money is going to Texas, and James Talarico (the Democratic candidate there) has not been shy about accusing Musk of trying to buy the election.

Sure, flying cars are cool. But I don't get the impression that Musk's politics have been forgotten at all.

I'm a research mathematician.

By all means, please read the article if it's interesting to you and ignore it if it isn't. But I believe that it's mostly directed to those already within the research math community, with a far more important purpose than to be interesting.

As the post itself explains, we (research mathematicians, as a profession) need to coordinate on deciding what a bright future will look like in a world with powerful AI, and in plotting a course to get there. And we need to do it fast, or circumstances might decide for us.

Historically, we've rather sucked at coordination. We need leadership -- we need someone to step forward, and begin by floating ideas and getting the conversation rolling. Personally I am very grateful for what Tao is doing here.

I'm a research mathematician. From what I can tell, the answer is roughly comparable to: if you posed 8,000 challenging open problems to the human math community, you might expect to see 372 of them solved within five years.

Probably some combination of: some of the 372 problems were easier than the rest; the AI got lucky on these 372; there were existing papers out there in the literature which proved especially helpful for these 372; and other similar factors.

And, in addition, many mathematicians are graduate students or postdocs hoping to line up a permanent job soon.

For example, if you look at Terry Tao's blog, he has a tremendous amount of first-class expository writing. So, too (to some extent) do junior mathematicians -- but, unfortunately, this tends to not be highly valued by the job market. Grad students and postdocs have learned that to succeed they need to play by the existing rules of the game.

Well, the board has just been yanked from underneath them. People like me can afford the sort of idealism and soul-searching that the parent comment describes, but junior mathematicians face a very unenviable set of circumstances.

Were the scientists who responded sincere?

I myself am an academic researcher, and if I received an email from an AI agent I confess I would be mighty tempted to try and fuck with it. Come up with some outlandish answer, just out of curiosity to see how it would respond.

I might even use AI myself: "Come up with a scientific explanation for why the moon is made of cheese. Your answer should be as preposterous as possible while using loads of scientific jargon, and written in the same style as actual science writing."

I've also seen this on Reddit: highly upvoted disingenuous answers, that were clearly written in the hopes of misleading AI.

Question for you or anyone else: as a forty-something single person without kids, is it reasonable to try to make friends with this crowd?

Most people my age do have kids, especially given that I'm living somewhere fairly quiet. I like kids and get along with them well -- indeed, to the extent that I'd happily occasionally babysit for free. But parents seem to be living in a different world.

One difficulty is that most parents seem to be deeply invested in their home lives and daily routines, in a way that I find difficult to relate to, which can make small talk difficult. But one way or another, I should probably make some attempts to expand my social life.

In practice, mathematicians' workloads have been a function of their work ethic, motivation, and competing demands on their time. There's no big-picture question of "how much math there is to do now"; the amount of remaining math to discover has long been presumed to be, for all intents and purposes, infinite. (Similar questions are relevant on a much smaller scale -- for example in case of someone who has specialized in a narrow specialty which goes dead.)

Your (1) is most certainly true.

As for your (2), most mathematicians I know have at most a passing interest in formalization, Mathlib, and Lean. My understanding, which is admittedly quite superficial, is that AI is actually getting quite good at translating human-readable mathematics. I could be mistaken about this, but even if there is a lot of human work to do, it sounds like a lot of anal-retentive oversight of work you didn't do yourself -- the sort of task that academics love to complain about!

Perhaps human interest in Lean will grow, but I don't anticipate it occupying the attention of more than a small slice of the community.

Your (3) is an interesting question. I work on the theoretical rather than applied side, but what you describe might very well be true for applied mathematicians.

As a mathematician, summer salary (from grants) is nice but I could do without it.

But external funding, e.g. from the NSF, also supports conferences -- and I suspect that few people would be willing to attend if they had to pay out of pocket. Without this opportunity to talk to one another, the field would be much worse off.

When online dating goes well, it quickly turns into ordinary dating.

And I think that's one important difference: with vibe coding you can't cast aside the AI after you've taken the initial step.

I'm a mathematician. I have a lot of trepidation about these tools and what they mean for the future of the profession.

That said... most of us are not working on problems as famous as Navier-Stokes. Even if OpenAI could scoop me based on my back-and-forth with ChatGPT, which I presume they could if they threw $15 million worth of compute at it, I highly doubt they'd bother.

> those universities that do want to do that

As a university professor, I've seen that all universities want to do everything.

By which I mean, they employ all sorts of people who are pushing a huge range of agendas. You can't meaningfully speak about "what universities want", because various factions tend to expect free rein to pursue their goals, and there is no mechanism to get everyone pushing in the same direction.

Update: the linked page has now been updated to say:

> it was Claude, with Levent Alpöge and Ava Howell!

Alpöge is the same guy who prompted Claude for a proof of the Jacobian conjecture.