The Year Math Changed Forever

There is an explanatory elegance to Rivka Galchen’s writing for The New Yorker that I’ve admired for a long time. Here, it finds a superb partner in the mind of Terence Tao, a renowned mathematician. As artificial intelligence casually spits out answers to notably evasive problems, Tao and his colleagues wrestle with the existential implications for their field. Galchen’s profile of Tao is also a demonstration of mathematics as human lineage and artistic practice, a chain of problems that has long encouraged expansive thinking. That chain now appears strained to the point of breaking—a potential “decoupling,” Galchen writes, of “problem-solving and insight.” Don’t miss the superb ending on this one.

“Let me be clear. There was no fun in this for me,” he said. “The fun was had before I gave it to this computer program. But talking to the A.I. about it—this is not fun.” He recalled, as a kid, falling in love with logic puzzles. What he loved was being in the dark, trying to find his way forward. “The fun part was not understanding, and struggling to understand,” he said. “Having all the solutions written down is the least fun part.”