4 winners, 3 can speak Chinese.
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Fields Medals 2026
101–110 of 128 posts
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jacob Tsimerman believes that AI will be better than human mathematicians within 2 years. We should not be surprised if AI solves the Millenium problems very soon and advances to a level that is barely comprehensible, or even incomprehensible, to the best humans. We can expect this not by curve fitting to recent progress but by reasoning from first principles about where the progress has come from (synthetic data, no…
The obvious and primary application will not be on showy millennium problems or long sought conjectures, but on optimizations and breakthroughs surrounding transformers.
We are doing fine so far with just Transformers, we have just crossed Trillion parameter models, we don't know if 100s of Trillion param model wont be better.
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#103Yu Deng is more famous now in china because he loves Lesbian fan fiction.
Can you elaborate? I don't know much about Yu Deng or lesbian fanfiction, but it's not a crossover I would have expected.
He once asked on zhihu (chinese quora) for recommendations of yuri (~= anime lesbian) fanfiction. Under his real name.
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#104IMU: We've awarded Fields medals to these outstanding mathematicians. Hackernews: Next time it'll all be LLMs. AI's going to kill us all, though, one of the mathematicians said so! Maths is useless anyway, what a bunch of nerds. Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic.
> Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic
Oddly. specific. Sorry, I don't get the reference, could you please tell me what/who does that refer to (which fanfic and person, and why said person and fact is relevant to this question)
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#105IMU: We've awarded Fields medals to these outstanding mathematicians. Hackernews: Next time it'll all be LLMs. AI's going to kill us all, though, one of the mathematicians said so! Maths is useless anyway, what a bunch of nerds. Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic.
> Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic Oddly. specific. Sorry, I don't get the reference, could you please tell me what/who does that refer to (which fanfic and person, and why said person and fact is relevant to this question)
The quote I've seen was that Yu Deng dedicated part of his success to reading yuri (lesbian themed) manga.
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#106IMU: We've awarded Fields medals to these outstanding mathematicians. Hackernews: Next time it'll all be LLMs. AI's going to kill us all, though, one of the mathematicians said so! Maths is useless anyway, what a bunch of nerds. Ooh, one of them likes lesbian fanfic.
[deleted]
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
The obvious and primary application will not be on showy millennium problems or long sought conjectures, but on optimizations and breakthroughs surrounding transformers.
We are doing fine so far with just Transformers, we have just crossed Trillion parameter models, we don't know if 100s of Trillion param model wont be better.
The breakthroughs would be mostly in optimizations for computing tokens, not as much in expanding parameter count (if anything we want to shrink that).
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did your 7 semesters of calculus include any courses that a math major would take? For example, a single upper-division undergrad level course on probability will expose you to measure theory. Similarly, harmonic analysis is something that you can take as a reasonably good senior in mathematics.
I took multivariate calculus (I to III), differential equations, statistics, discrete math, and linear algebra. I didn't take those courses you're talking about, but that's my point. I have a top <1% education in math in the nation, maybe top 2-3% of all college grads, and that's not enough to even scratch the surface of the summary.
Harmonic analysis is "just" working with harmonic functions which you have enough background for: f(x,y) is harmonic if f_xx+f_yy=0 (f_xx=2nd partial derivative w/r/t/ x, and so on). Higher dimensions work the same: f_{x1x1} + f_{x2x2} + f_{x3x3}+.... = 0.
Re: Fields Medals 2026
#109"harmonic analysis and geometric measure theory, including applications of multiscale and decoupling techniques to the local smoothing conjecture for the planar wave equation, and major advances in Fourier restriction, Falconer distance sets, Furstenberg sets in the plane, and the Kakeya problem in three dimensions." I'm not sure there is another profession in the world where it's impossible to explain to a layman on…
I used to do something similar (at a lower level), and my solution was to lie, just lie. A big part was about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform so my description was something like:
I work in something related to Image Compression, so when the computer has to download the image from Internet it's smaller and use less data. Anyway, I study the mathematical part, not the programming part.
The idea is that images usually have big plain parts like the sky or the wall of a house, so you use big blobs of "ink" to paint them. For the border you use smaller blobs of "ink". And very close to the border you use smaller and smaller blobs of "ink". In this method, all the blobs of "ink" has the same shape, the only difference is the size. Also, the plain parts are not perfectly plain, so you use some small blobs of "ink" there.
In a typical image, you need very few blobs of "ink" if you pick the shape of the blobs of "ink" correctly. So you can only send the position and size of the blobs of "ink", that is much smaller than sending all the information of the image. The hard part is choosing a shape of the blobs of "ink" to make this conversion automatically and very fast, without asking the computer to do something smart to select the positions.
If the listener has more technical background:
The blobs of "ink" have white "ink" in some parts and black "ink" in other parts. This correspond to positive and negative values and actually all the blobs of "ink" are an orthonormal base so the calculation is only a orthonormal base change, that is super easy and fast. There is no smart selection of the position of the blobs of "ink" positions, just a boring orthonormal base change.
If the listener has even more technical background:
Something something Fourier Transform.
I don't want to count how many lies that description has. Also, all the parts in this description were done by other persons perhaps 10 year before me. I think I only once compressed an image, just for fun, and got a tiny compression because it was a toy method (¿Haar base?).