With automated proof-checkers, a problem can be broken up into small chunks, solved bit-by-bit, then reassembled with confidence that every piece is correct. For some, this heralds a new area in mathematical research.

The following has been adapted from The Proof in the Code: How a Truth Machine Is Transforming Math and AI by Kevin Hartnett.

Terry Tao has never been afraid of unconventional ideas. In November 2014, he was on a panel of five distinguished mathematicians, all inaugural recipients of the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, which came with a $3 million award. The laureates’ conversation ranged from whether mathematics is invented or discovered — most of the mathematicians agreed that, at the very least, it feels like an act of discovery — to an assessment of the odds that we’re living in a digital simulation. “Yeah, I think we’re actually not real,” said Maxim Kontsevich, who did his most important work in the 1990s at the intersection of math and physics.

Yet over the course of the 40-minute discussion, the statements that drew the most incredulity were Tao’s. He predicted that in the future, instead of working alone or in small teams of two or three, mathematicians might work on projects with hundreds of other people at a time. And when these collaborations were over, he said — in his modest, understated way — the results might be checked not by human referees but by computers. “One day we may actually write our papers not in LaTeX, but in some language which some smart software will convert to a formal language, and every so often you’ll get a compilation error — the computer does not understand how you derived this step,” he said.

The statement was greeted by the event moderator and the other laureates as preposterous enough to make the simulation hypothesis seem reasonable by comparison. Even more surprising than the idea of hundreds of mathematicians working together was the fact that such a collaboration would appeal to Tao — because if anyone in the world seemed well suited to going it alone, it was him.

Tao was born in 1975 in Adelaide, Australia, three years after his parents immigrated to the country from Hong Kong. The first signs that their firstborn son was different came early. When Tao was 2 and his family was visiting friends, his parents found him gathered with several 6-year-olds, demonstrating how to count using wooden blocks. Asked how he’d learned to count things, he responded that he had seen it on Sesame Street. Five years later, when Tao was 7, he began learning calculus.



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