Tim Gowers publishes explanation for not signing Fields medallists' AI letter
1 Sep 17 · 6d ago · 1 article · 4 posts · 3 sources · development 1 of 1
Gowers posted a blog entry detailing why he declined to sign a letter authored by 25 Fields medallists about artificial intelligence in mathematics. He stated he agrees with much of the letter's content and accepts that mathematics faces a crisis, but wants to offer a different analysis of what that crisis is.
“I felt that I could not sign the letter, despite agreeing with much of what it said. Also, I agree on the fundamental point that we are facing a crisis: I just want to offer a slightly different analysis of what that crisis is.”
Tim GowersTim Gowers Fields medallist mathematician25 Fields medallists Signatories of letter on AI in mathematics
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first by HN Best, 6d ago
What people said 9 voices · verbatim
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This is really a microcosm of one particular problem that AI presents to the world: what do people do when their labour is not required any longer?Here the worry is the social structures of mathematics are eroded such that fewer humans become able to do the work and less well, similarly to how juniors are being recruited less in software…
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The recent Fields medallists' letter about using AI and its impact in maths and maths research was not signed by Tim Gowers. Here are his musings explaining why ... https:// gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/1 7/why-i-didnt-sign-the-fields-medallists-letter/ CC: @ wtgowers
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> With that interpretation, the issue becomes slightly different: is it more important that the collective understanding of the mathematical community should be as advanced as possible or that there should be answers to as many problems as possible? Or are those two aims valuable in different ways, so that there is no point in declaring one of…
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I thought one of the implicit points of the open letter was that unsolved problems are not something that falls out of the sky, they are a curated resource that people have spent time on and shared for the benefit of like-minded peers and humanity as a whole. And the AI companies treat them like they treat absolutely everything else: natural…
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Solving a theorem is like climbing a new mountain. The mountain is already there, and there is a list of the hardest known mountains to climb. The point of climbing them and not just dropping with a plane on top of the peak is to help develop human climbing skills and expand our knowledge and abilities. Also, already conquered mountains are…
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I think the author did not mention that the way humans construct the knowledge ladder requires low complexity because each step gives power to the next, but the AI with the exponential exploration can give biggers steps but then it stagnates because the next step can be beyond the exponential exploration complexity. In chess a good strategy can be…
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One thing I've found in my own use of AI, which Gowers touches on in his point at the end but which I think deserves more attention: AI makes some previously non-trivial tasks trivial, but that doesn't make the work itself trivial. You naturally expand the scope of what you attempt and take on harder problems than you could before. The floor…
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> we urgently need to come up with good ways of explaining the value of having a large pool of human mathematical experts, even if it is no longer part of their role to find new proofs of theorems.This is the main issue, and while I fully agree with that value sentiment, the referenced letter failed to provide convincing arguments for why…
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I agree with your argument of expected societal shift, but it's important to keep in mind that this is largely a developed country issue. It'll be a while before child-staffed cobalt mines or whatever is superseded. A significant amount of poverty could be alleviated through improved resource distribution and policy, without really needing…
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