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The New York Times profiles Terence Tao, the mathematician who became a tenured professor at 24, and why he has ended up as the field's unofficial spokesman on AI. The piece argues that established academics like him feel less threatened by AI than younger researchers just starting out.
- Tao says senior academics are not as threatened by AI as people beginning their careers.
- His celebrity has made him the de facto public voice for mathematics on AI, and that role now takes up most of his time.
- The math community is looking to him for answers, which the headline frames as a "war footing."
Researchers used BootLoops, an AI tool built with Claude, to scan scientific literature across 22 fields and identify problems that could be solved by borrowing techniques from unrelated disciplines. In 3 months, the team produced 36 papers solving problems ranging from calculating evolutionary tree probabilities to creating an 8x larger database of language sound systems.
- BootLoops discovered that many unsolved problems in different fields share identical mathematical structures with known solutions from physics, computer science, or math—but researchers didn't know to look across disciplines.
- The AI solved 15 previously unsolved integrals in high-energy physics and created ACCSTACK, a database of 6,000+ languages' stress and tone patterns that's eight times larger than the previous largest dataset.
- The approach requires heavy human judgment to work: the AI lacks "research taste" and can't determine what scientists actually care about, and it tends to favor older, highly cited work over new problems.