Lately I've been thinking a lot about mathematicians What does it feel like to be surpassed by AI? What does it do to your sense of self? Your beliefs about your work? About the future? So we found some of the world's best mathematicians and asked them A chronicle... of a moment in history:show more

Thank you to @wtgowers, Kevin Buzzard, Leslie Ann Goldberg and Steven Sivek for taking time to talk to us And to producer extraordinaire @Ele_Chiarella for making this all happen

Man… imagine being a mathematician and realizing the thing you dedicated your whole life to is now something a machine can do better. That has to different.

You should have interviewed my son, who’s doing a related PhD at Oxford.

What does he make of it? I’m so curious

AI getting involved is not actually helpful to the science of physics / maths etc because it’s in the workings that the numbers come alive and produce other avenues of enquiry. Science is not a tick-box exercise.

To me maths and physics are quite distinct here. Massive simplification but physics is applied maths. For that reason I think AI will be incredible for physics because it will give physicists many more tools to play with. Long term it could be the same for maths but in the short term it will b hard - partly for reasons of status and motivation and partly because the process is now opaque

Well, theoretical particle physics (my son’s PhD) is a bit less “applied” than the average but I hear you on the other points, yes.

Unfortunately, there will still be people denying that (or using older models to judge the frontier).