Calegari tells mathematicians to change their own institutions after AI
On Terence Tao’s blog, Frank Calegari argues that the subject is not finished, and that mathematicians should spend their effort on hiring, publishing and training.
Source published · In the Daily Brief of 2 November 2026
Filed under Mathematics, AI industry
Frank Calegari’s guest post on Terence Tao’s blog, published on 1 November, starts from OpenAI’s release of more than 700 papers on 6 October. He calls the release a watershed, and also says the papers are atrociously written, breach norms of attribution and in some cases are wrong.
His argument is that mathematicians control how they hire, publish and train students far more than they control large companies. He compares the moment with the classification of finite simple groups, which cooled interest in that field, and calls for work like Gorenstein, Lyons and Solomon’s revision of the proof, along with jobs that reward it. Central conjectures, he says, mark the edge of current understanding, not the end of a subject.
The post follows a report from a Harvard summit of 32 mathematicians, with five working groups, and a paper from the UK’s Academy for the Mathematical Sciences, both posted on the same blog last week.