Gowers declines to sign Fields medallists' AI letter, citing different crisis analysis
The mathematician explains his dissent from 25 colleagues' statement on artificial intelligence in mathematics.
What to know
- Tim Gowers, a Fields medallist, declined to sign a letter signed by 25 other Fields medallists about AI's impact on mathematics research.
- Gowers agrees that mathematics faces a crisis but disputes the nature of that crisis, preferring to articulate his analysis independently.
- Gowers disclosed early access to OpenAI models and contacts in their mathematics group while distancing himself from taking an oppositional stance to avoid community division.
- The broader mathematical community appears to be grappling with how AI should be integrated into and understood within mathematics research and practice.
Tim Gowers Fields medallist mathematician25 Fields medallists Signatories of letter on AI in mathematics
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Gowers declares commitment to preventing mathematical community division — In his post, Gowers emphasized he is not aligning himself with an opposing camp and expressed concern about potential bitter division in the mathematics community.
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Tim Gowers publishes explanation for not signing Fields medallists' AI letter
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 Gowers -
first by HN Best, 6d ago
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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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What people are saying 21 voices from 1 site · best of 42 · verbatim
- Sep 18
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My succinct summary understanding is that recall is more important than precision for collective understanding at the level of mathematical discovery that we are currently at (borrowing IR terms); i.e., that it is more important to produce good results at scale than to ensure that only good results are produced, and that we have the AI-assisted…
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The post seems to make this assumption that AI companies are going to want to solve all the major outstanding problems in mathematics, and possibly some adjacent fields like Computer Science and Physics, maybe.Is that really the case? The cost to OpenAI for the Navier-Stokes problem has been estimated in the millions of dollars, anything between 6…
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This argument is a bit nonsensical to me: the practical “value” of having mathematician has always been very indirect anyway, it's not like mathematical proofs of most problems mathematicians are working on have any practical value.The reason why you want, as a society, to have a pool of human mathematicians sitting around solving problem nobody's…
- Sep 17
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I think mathematics is (1) valuable as a way to develop human thinking; (2) useful for us to understand in (more or less practical) ways that will remain valid for the foreseeable feature; (3) enjoyable. This to me indicates we should find ways to keep funding mathematics for its own sake, i.e. just let mathematicians do whatever they think is…
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> In short, it seems to me that while a flood of “big” AI results would be likely to increase the amount of important mathematics that was not properly digested, it would also be likely to increase the amount that was properly digested, which seems like a pretty good bargain.This seems like the crux of the argument to me, and I agree.> my worry is…
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I think they'll end up more like scientists. Landau famously advised his students to be proficient in math so that when they're working on a problem it's the scientific understanding that's the rate limiting step, not the math. Now mathematicians will be freed of some of the burden of proving things and their challenge will instead be to find…
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Imagine a world where mathematics is not understood by any human. Theorems and mountains of proof papers are constructed on a daily basis by automated machines at a rate far to quick for humans to understand.These theorems DO benefit humanity but are largely unseen. You ask the LLM to make you an app. The LLM makes the app and utilizes entire…
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I cook because I like to tinker, understand how variation in recipes affect flavor, and occasionally stumble upon something novel and tasty. The journey is most important but the goal is nice.My wife cooks to produce a meal and feed our family. The journey is a necessary evil to achieve a goal.We are aware of this difference in style and have…
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> At one end of the spectrum you have mathematicians who are primarily motivated by the wish to solve problems, who see conceptual understanding as a very important means to that end. At the other you have mathematicians who are primarily motivated by the wish to attain conceptual understanding, who see problem-solving as a very important means to…
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>why mathematicians should widely receive funding for merely understanding thingsimagine yourself living in the 1700show would you justify Newton and Leibniz's work on calculus?all maritime engineering and trade was done with geometry and arithmetic at the time. there were no practical applications, not for likely at least a century until…
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This is meant to be a funny, stylized comment. If you can't bother to read to the end, just ask a chatbot to explain it to you.Most people do not use any math after school in their lives. All of their real problems are political. Kids spend significant time in school being told that math teaches them "problem solving" and then leave school and…
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I don't think that the main issue either discussed by Gowers or the others who have signed the letter is simply that mathematicians should be paid "for merely understanding things". The main issue is outsourcing, laziness, and learned helplessness.Outsourcing understanding, teaching, and proving maths to LLMs is just as dumb as outsourcing food…
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Math professor here.Different academic disciplines are very different, and most don't engage in the same kind of black-and-white problem solving that mathematicians do, where you either have solved a problem or you haven't.But all insist that you engage in some sort of outwardly visible production in your field: books, articles, conference…
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I hate to say it, but if AI keeps advancing at the current rate, the justification for keeping humans in the loop will grow increasingly hard to make.There's definitely the possibility that in just a few years, human mathematicians will largely become irrelevant in the face of extremely capable models.I don't like it, I think there are a lot of…
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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 Fields medallists’ letter failed to provide convincing arguments for why…
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> what do people do when their labour is not required any longerI don't think this is the main issue (if at all) discussed here or in the field medalist letter. If anything, the majority of pure mathematics graduates are absorbed from the industry and a lot of exodus happens along the different scales of academia to there (though industry is also…
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"And maybe I could have tried to gain that respect in a different way, such as thinking very hard about an area of mathematics until I was able to demonstrate to others just how well I understood it. But I’m not sure how motivating that would have been for me. I very much hope that there is a pool of young people for whom it will be a powerful…
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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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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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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 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…