A winner of the Fields Medal, often considered one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, said Friday he believes artificial intelligence will become “superhuman” at math “in a matter of years” and that the technology presents a “serious” threat to humanity
Jacob Tsimerman, a professor at the University of Toronto who told the Chronicle that he will be working for OpenAI starting late August, was one of four mathematicians awarded the Fields Medal on Thursday.
Stony Brook University professor John Pardon, who got his doctorate at Stanford University, joined Tsimerman, Yu Deng and Hong Wang in being awarded one of the “Nobels of math.” They will each receive 15,000 Canadian dollars, or roughly $10,600
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Though Tsimerman’s award-winning research is on number theory and algebraic geometry, fields with applications in cybersecurity, including encryption, he told the New York Times that he is changing his focus to artificial intelligence.
“I’ve had a career that I’m very happy with. I have maybe 50 papers or something over 20 years,” Tsimerman said. “I think very shortly, AI will be able to create way more papers of way higher quality.”
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Tsimerman said he believes AI will soon be doing “everything that mathematicians do now better and faster.”
He also believes AI poses a serious threat to humanity, including a risk for human extinction, emphasizing the need for more rigorous AI evaluations and even international treaties
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“The protests in San Francisco,” he said, “a lot of them are aiming to pause AI or slow down AI or some of them to stop AI because they think we aren’t ready, we’re building these technologies faster than we can control them. I don’t agree with all the recommendations, but I definitely agree with the diagnosis of the problem. I think that the public has to take this problem more seriously and then governments do as well.”
Pardon received the Fields Medal for his work in symplectic geometry and knot theory, two areas of math with geometric foundations. According to Quanta Magazine, his research has led to a mathematical structure now named a Pardon algebra. Pardon did not respond to requests for comment
“This is, I hope, just the beginning,” said Stanford math professor Yakov Eliashberg, who was Pardon’s doctoral adviser and described working with him as an “extremely rewarding experience
“I very much hope that John will continue to create new mathematics, and I’m sure he will surprise the mathematical world with many new great results,” Eliashberg said
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After receiving his doctorate, Pardon was a Stanford assistant professor before heading to Princeton University, where he stayed until joining Stony Brook’s faculty in 2022.
Yu Deng and Hong Wang, who are the first Chinese nationals to win the Fields Medal, also had stints as professors at California universities. Deng was a professor at the University of Southern California in 2018-24, while Wang, the third woman to receive the Fields Medal in its 90-year history, was an assistant professor at UCLA until 2023
The Fields Medal is awarded once every four years during the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians, a weeklong event currently being held in Philadelphia. Established in 1932 and first awarded in Oslo, Norway, in 1936, the prize is named after Canadian mathematician J.C. Fields, who donated funds to establish the awards. The medals are decided by a committee that chooses “at least two, with a strong preference for four,” winners, whose 40th birthdays must fall after Jan. 1 of the year in which the prize is awarded.
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In a survey of awardees, the IREG Observatory on Academic Ranking and Excellence found that the Fields Medal had the second-highest reputation score for math awards, scoring 0.95, behind the Abel Prize, which scored 0.97. The Nobel Prizes have the highest reputation score of 1.00
