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- Hacker News
- Congrats to the winners! I’m not sure how accurate this prediction is, but 2026 may be the last time pure humans win the Fields Medal. By 2030, AI could be a coauthor on many winning results. With recent news about LLMs solving major conjectures, winning IMO gold medals, and so much rapid progress, a lot is happening.by num42
- I don't remember the details exactly. I think earlier this year someone listed an LLM as a coauthor on a paper, maybe in physics or maybe another field. I remember reading about it on Reddit, but I'm not sure when or which paper it was. If anyone remembers what I'm referring to, please let me know.by num42
- Fields medals are for humans. We can create an award for AIs for the same reason for humans and machines don't compete against each other in sports. Machines are usually faster and stronger.by pmontra
- I posted a similar comment when the winners were leaked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48906573
i’d like to revise my earlier comment: 2022 may have been the last time we had pure humans win a Fields Medal.
I’m fairly certain this batch's winners used LLMs for research, lit-revews, reviewing work, and calculations... perhaps not enough to count as a co-author, but still enough to handle a lot of the grunt work.
Who would have imagined the pace of progress in LLM-powered math..
by netvarun - 4 winners, 3 can speak Chinese.by tw1984
- Hong Wang was the outlier among the four winners. She was not a traditional mathematical genius. She never participated in any mathematics competitions. Her major when she entered Peking University was not mathematics. During her master's studies in Paris, she even considered changing her major to study architecture.by codedump
- IMU: We've awarded Fields medals to these outstanding mathematicians.
Hackernews: Next time it'll all be LLMs. AI's going to kill us all, though, one of the mathematicians said so! Maths is useless anyway, what a bunch of nerds. Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic.
by aureate - > Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic
Oddly. specific. Sorry, I don't get the reference, could you please tell me what/who does that refer to (which fanfic and person, and why said person and fact is relevant to this question)
by torginus - The winners were inadvertently announced early:
- One was IMO gold medal winner as well.by mkagenius
- *Two IMO gold medal winners. Three ISO gold medal winners. Six ISO gold medals collectively :)
- Yu Deng: IMO gold [1]
- Jacob Tsimerman: 2x IMO gold [2]
- John Pardon: 3x IOI gold [3]
Fun fact: Tsimerman and Deng both overlapped with Peter Scholze (another Fields Medal recipient) at the IMO
[1] https://www.imo-official.org/results/contestant/8824/
by mauriziocalo - Well deserved. Congratulations to them!by rvz
- "harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, and major advances in Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions."
I'm not sure there is another profession in the world where it's impossible to explain to a layman on what the winners of their most prestigious award have worked on.
by siva7 - Mathematicians might be good with math but their naming skills is atrocious
Same with their ability to summarize and explain things
And their ability to create mathematical objects that are similar, but weird in a funky way, to the actual real objects.
by raverbashing - Besides the usual jargon, what I find interesting is that the tradition of always naming things after their discoverers: Fourier, Falconer, Furstenberg, Kakeya. 4 names in one sentence.
Other fields do it, but it is almost systematic in math, and arguably, it makes things even harder to understand as people names are not descriptive.
by GuB-42 - My experience talking with high level mathematicians is that they tend to know their subjects so well and are so excited to share it that they can and will scale their explanation to match their audience.by solomonb
- I used to do something similar (at a lower level), and my solution was to lie, just lie. A big part was about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform so my description was something like:
I work in something related to Image Compression, so when the computer has to download the image from Internet it's smaller and use less data. Anyway, I study the mathematical part, not the programming part.
The idea is that images usually have big plain parts like the sky or the wall of a house, so you use big blobs of "ink" to paint them. For the border you use smaller blobs of "ink". And very close to the border you use smaller and smaller blobs of "ink". In this method, all the blobs of "ink" has the same shape, the only difference is the size. Also, the plain parts are not perfectly plain, so you use some small blobs of "ink" there.
In a typical image, you need very few blobs of "ink" if you pick the shape of the blobs of "ink" correctly. So you can only send the position and size of the blobs of "ink", that is much smaller than sending all the information of the image. The hard part is choosing a shape of the blobs of "ink" to make this conversion automatically and very fast, without asking the computer to do something smart to select the positions.
If the listener has more technical background:
The blobs of "ink" have white "ink" in some parts and black "ink" in other parts. This correspond to positive and negative values and actually all the blobs of "ink" are an orthonormal base so the calculation is only a orthonormal base change, that is super easy and fast. There is no smart selection of the position of the blobs of "ink" positions, just a boring orthonormal base change.
If the listener has even more technical background:
Something something Fourier Transform.
I don't want to count how many lies that description has. Also, all the parts in this description were done by other persons perhaps 10 year before me. I think I only once compressed an image, just for fun, and got a tiny compression because it was a toy method (¿Haar base?).
by gus_massa - This article explains the Kakeya Conjecture in amazing detail and understandability: https://www.quantamagazine.org/hong-wang-wins-2026-fields-me...by feyman_r
- Try the Quanta magazine articles.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/series/fields-and-abacus-meda...
by fn-mote - I bet she could do it. Maybe not in a sentence, but at least the Kakeya problem is easy to understand, so maybe these other things would be explainable by an expert. I would like to see them try at least!
fwiw, I feel the same way about biology "Lysing action of the (1,2)b-carotene receptive encephalopathy pathway" type shit.
by frakt0x90 - Reading the descriptions of their work makes me think of magic. It's an understanding of the principles of math and physics at a level above almost everyone on the planet - these are modern wizards.
- So overhyped. Yet they have no power but some prestige among nerds. The reason why it is bad is that the money/status is very limited relative to the amount of smart people. I would rather praise developments in quantitative sciences.by leonvoss
- The description of Yu Deng's work should be accessible to someone who's taken condensed matter physics in grad school.by BeetleB
- Clarke’s third law.by layer8
- Yu Deng is more famous now in china because he loves Lesbian fan fiction.by yanhangyhy
- Can you elaborate? I don't know much about Yu Deng or lesbian fanfiction, but it's not a crossover I would have expected.by Version467
- Scary stuff from one of the winners:
"A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence"
(Jacob Tsimerman, Andrew Critch)
by hackandthink - This would work better as a lesswrong post
- Ed Zitron should write his newsletter with LaTeX and publish them as PDFs in arxiv. Seems to make the techbros automatically take it seriously. Maybe that's what it takes to pop the bubble.by ares623
- Just by reading the abstract it's terrifying.by sirbutters