Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fields Medals 2026

mathunion.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 128 posts

Re: Fields Medals 2026

#111

Post by aureate »

torginus wrote: post #104
aureate wrote: post #95

IMU: 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)

It was a reference to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49031519. Not a topic I know anything about.

Re: Fields Medals 2026

#112

Post by leonvoss »

nl wrote: post #65
leonvoss wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantitative scientists are also mathematicians. I'm not attacking mathematics, just probably-useless subfields. Is there any good quantitative evidence that actually estimates what percent of math work today will be useful? Because to me it seems like <1% and I feel like we could easily make that number a lot higher. Particularly I want to see massive improvements in quantitative social science; physics already gets…

Here are a couple of Fields medalists' work that had direct practical applications less than 5 years after publication: Terence Tao's work (with Emmanuel Candès and Justin Romberg) on compressed sensing. Published in 2004-05. By 2007 that was being used for in-vivo MRI reconstruction with substantially undersampled data June Huh's work on combinatorial Hodge theory was used within 3 years to improve sampling for rand…

> Published in 2004-05. By 2007 that was being used for in-vivo MRI reconstruction with substantially undersampled data

I have argued exact claim before and from what I recall, Tao maybe contributed 1% to MRI improvements in the last 20 to 30 years. You are way over exaggerating the importance of what he did.

Re: Fields Medals 2026

#113

Post by butlike »

bananaflag wrote: post #84
anvuong wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, how many humans do you think are able to prompt this to the LLM? "The homogeneity in x is an intertwining between a dilation (x,r,u) to (lambda x, r,u) and a dilation (P,Q,R) to (lambda^-2 P, lambda^-1 Q, lambda R) which seems to collapse the 3d jacobian to a sort of twisted 2d jacobian. Is there a general theory of such twisted jacobians and do you have any sense why those particular dilation weights were used…

Read these 4 prompts and tell me again how in the future we shall still need human expertise: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a60b2eb-0b64-83ee-9c76-7931ca1de0...

Because the 4 prompts were actually still prompting for the original prompt (ugh.) in that the computer did not come up with a "complete unconditional counterexample" and the human expertise is required to discern that.

Re: Fields Medals 2026

#114

Post by hnfong »

raincole wrote: post #103
Version467 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not only that.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/yu-deng-wins-the-fields-medal...

> For comfort, Deng turned to manga. “I remember him at Courant. He was always holding a manga,” said Jalal Shatah, a professor there who formerly chaired the math department. Deng particularly liked stories about deep friendship and romance and found himself drawn to a genre known as yuri, which focuses on those kinds of relationships between women — stories that “feel nice and warm and beautiful,” as he put it. They helped him be kinder to himself, “more comfortable with life.”

----

Note that while the description "anime lesbian" might sound weird to western audiences, within asian nerd subcultures it's relatively a common thingy.

Re: Fields Medals 2026

#116

Post by fragmede »

ares623 wrote: post #85
hackandthink wrote: post #34

Scary stuff from one of the winners: "A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence" (Jacob Tsimerman, Andrew Critch) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369

Ed Zitron should write his newsletter with LaTeX and publish them as PDFs in arxiv. Seems to make the techbros automatically take it seriously. Maybe that's what it takes to pop the bubble.

Whether or not Ed is right, he doesn't take any criticism, but peer review is a fundamental tenet of actual science. Vs being a blowhard on the Internet and getting paid for it.

Re: Fields Medals 2026

#117

Post by Ar-Curunir »

nerdsniper wrote: post #75
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #71

Earlier 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.

Every engineering student in the US takes those courses. I did too. That doesn’t make us top 2-3% of college grads.

The stuff you mentioned is first year business for most math undergraduates. You should not expect to know most things in senior level math after taking just first-year math.

It’s like expecting to know computational complexity theory, or distributed systems theory, after taking first year CS.

Re: Fields Medals 2026

#118

Post by MattCruikshank »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #73
MattCruikshank wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know which bots are the best at Chess. You'd care which AI is the most accurate at diagnosing your medical condition. It's not a bad thing to keep track of which automated systems are the best at certain tasks.

We don't call those bots grandmasters and have them compete in championships, nor do we laud them for beating human grandmasters.

There are actually championships. People do refer to different bots at being at the Master level, Grandmaster level, etc. In Chess, in Go, etc.

They might not be officials, they not might represent the official organizations, but those things do happen.

Re: Fields Medals 2026

#119

Post by Jach »

gus_massa wrote: post #109
siva7 wrote: post #20

"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…

At least you are aware of the lies. I'm reminded of Feynman's refusal to lie about the nature of magnets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q): "You'd soon ask me about the nature of the [rubber] bands." Even in his digression about "why" questions, in giving a very high level reason for why ice is slippery he adds "they say", since I suspect he knew at the time the usual explanation had problems, and only recently do we have better explanations (https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-is-ice-slippery-a-new-hyp...). But at the same time, I've thought, it can be fun to try and come up with nice sounding lies, or analogies, or oversimplifications, especially for some types of people who won't leave you alone about something until they think they've understood something (even if a lie), or who want something repeatable to tell their friends about so they can brag about you. Still I think honesty is a better policy, even if it's not as satisfying, and if departed from at least making sure both sides know there are convenient lies and oversimplifications. As a student I would be (and have been) very put out if the goal is to understand something on a technical level and the teacher starts with lies.

Re: Fields Medals 2026

#120

Post by vonneumannstan »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #115
BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to tell me von Neumann's work has had no impact on the world?

No, I'm saying that JvN would have recoiled hard from that sentiment.

His work was incredibly APPLIED. Which is precisely why he is remembered and lauded.

Can anyone here not involved in theoretical math name 5 Fields Medalists? Take out Terry Tao or Andrew Wiles or Gigori Perelman and can you name any Pure Mathematicians from the last century at all?

Post reply on HN