Gowers's Weblog

A little over two months ago, Jacob Tsimerman surprised a lot of people by announcing, immediately after he had received a Fields Medal, that he would be giving up mathematical research and “pivoting to AI safety”.

When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem.

For the sake of anyone who might read this blog post in the distant future (a month from now, say), let me mention that I am writing it a few days after OpenAI announced that it had solved ten major problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science,

Last September I went to a workshop at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden to discuss mathematics and AI with historians, philosophers, computer scientists, AI researchers, and mathematicians of several different flavours (though there was a surprising preponder…

We are all having to keep revising upwards our assessments of the mathematical capabilities of large language models.

An Artin-Tits group is a group with a finite set of generators in which every relation is of the form or for some positive integer , where and are two of the generators.

It’s been over three years since my last post on this blog and I have sometimes been asked, understandably, whether the project I announced in my previous post was actually happening.

I am very happy to say that I have recently received a generous grant from the Astera Institute to set up a small group to work on automatic theorem proving, in the first instance for about three years after which we will take stock and see whether it is…

Four years ago I wrote a post about an awful plan by Leicester University to sack its entire mathematics department, invite them to reapply for their jobs, and rehire all but six “lowest performers”.

From time to time academic journals undergo an interesting process of fission.

The adaptive-triggering policy.

It’s taken longer than we originally intended, but I am very happy to report that Advances in Combinatorics, a new arXiv overlay journal that is run along similar lines to Discrete Analysis, has just published its first five articles, with plenty more in…

I have just received an email from Sergey Kitaev, one of the three combinatorialists at Strathclyde.

This post is addressed at anyone who is voting in Great Britain in the forthcoming elections to the European Parliament and whose principal aim is to maximize the number of MEPs from Remain-supporting parties, where those are deemed to be the Liberal Demo…

A couple of months ago, I can’t remember precisely how, I became aware of a book called How I Wish I’d Taught Maths, by Craig Barton, that seemed to be highly thought of.

The following story arrived in my email inbox (and those of many others) this morning.

One should of course be concerned when anybody is detained for spurious reasons, but when that person is a noted mathematician, the shock is greater.

This is a bit of a niche post, since its target audience is people who are familiar with quasirandom graphs and like proofs of an analytic flavour.

First, I’d like to thank the large number of commenters on my previous post for keeping the discussion surprisingly calm and respectful given the topic discussed.

Update to post, added 11th September.

This post is to announce that a new journal, Advances in Combinatorics, has just opened for submissions.

It has been in the news recently — or rather, the small corner of the news that is of particular interest to mathematicians — that Maryanthe Malliaris and Saharon Shelah recently had an unexpected breakthrough when they stumbled on a proof that two infini…

While Polymath13 has (barring a mistake that we have not noticed) led to an interesting and clearly publishable result, there are some obvious follow-up questions that we would be wrong not to try to answer before finishing the project, especially as some…

There is widespread (even if not universal) agreement that something is deeply wrong with the current system of academic publishing.

I have now completed a draft of a write-up of a proof of the following statement.

It has become clear that what we need in order to finish off one of the problems about intransitive dice is a suitable version of the local central limit theorem.

I hope, but am not yet sure, that this post is a counterexample to Betteridge’s law of headlines.