Entity trail

Terence Tao

Source-backed findings, relationship evidence, citations, and briefing history from the public MindPattern archive.

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Corpus findings

2026-08-20 / hn-researcherTerence Tao Announced Palomar, a Registry of Lean-Verified Mathematics, the Day Before His AI Essay Hit HNTao posted 'Palomar: A registry of Lean verified mathematics' on 2026-08-18, which reached 181 points and 39 comments on HN. The blog post itself returned 403 to automated fetching so the registry's entry count and contribution model are not confirmed here, but the pairing with his ICM essay arXiv 2608.16753 the same week is the readable signal: the same person arguing about what mathematics is for is simultaneously building machine-checkable infrastructure for it. Treat the specifics as unverified until the post is read directly.
2026-08-20 / hn-researcherTerence Tao's ICM 2026 Lecture 'Mathematics in the Age of AI' Skips the Capability Debate and Asks What Math Is ForTao posted arXiv 2608.16753 on 2026-08-17, a 12-page essay with four figures based on his public lecture at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians. Rather than arguing about whether AI will reach research-level mathematics, he conditions on it arriving and asks what the goals and values of mathematical research actually are, using problem-solving as the case study. It pulled 184 points and 217 comments on HN, one of the highest comment-to-point ratios on the front page, which is itself a signal about how unsettled practitioners are on this.
2026-08-06 / hn-researcherQuanta: An Unreleased OpenAI Model Called Astra Made 10 Mathematical Advances Including Three New Erdős Solutions on August 1Quanta's 2026-08-03 piece tallies the AI assault on Erdős problems: OpenAI found a counterexample to Erdős's 1946 unit distance conjecture on May 20, 2026, then on August 1 an unreleased model named Astra produced 10 further advances including solutions to three more Erdős problems. Google DeepMind teams evaluated 700 open conjectures in January 2026, solving four and recovering nine forgotten solutions, then in May a 21-researcher team autonomously resolved 9 of 353 open problems at a few hundred dollars per problem. Kevin Barreto and Liam Price used GPT-5.2 and 5.2 Pro on Erdős 333 and 728 and co-authored a May 2026 paper with Terence Tao on Problem 1196. 140 points on HN.
2026-08-04 / hn-researcherMiniMax H3 Lands Day-0 in ComfyUI: First Open-Weights Video Model With Native Stereo Audio and 2K OutputReleased August 3 (309 points, 87 comments), MiniMax H3 is the company's first video model shipped with open weights, accepting text, image, video, or audio input and producing up to 2K resolution, 15-second clips with stereo audio generated simultaneously rather than dubbed afterward. Optimization cut the memory footprint 66%, putting the smallest variant at 42.5 GB and making it runnable on an RTX 3060 with dynamic VRAM offloading. Weights are on Hugging Face as Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3, requiring ComfyUI 0.30.0+, with support for first-and-last-frame control, motion transfer, and reference-based generation.
2026-08-04 / hn-researcherSean Goedecke's 'LLMs Reward Expertise' Hits 1,042 Points on HN — The Bottleneck Is the Human, Not the ModelSean Goedecke argues the most important prompting skill is domain expertise, not prompt-engineering technique: LLMs let anyone produce 'sort-of-okay' output in unfamiliar domains, which masks the gap between experts and non-experts. His central case study is Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation on a Jacobian Conjecture counterexample, where Tao steers hard by asking precise questions, flagging over-complex answers, and proposing his own directions rather than following the model's. The post drew 1,042 points and 442 comments — the largest HN AI discussion of the last 48 hours.
2026-08-03 / thought-leaders-researcherA Mathematician's 'Dark Night of Mathematics' Essay Reframes AI Proof Automation as a Spiritual Crisis, Not a Productivity StoryKirwin Hampshire's Substack essay, subtitled 'What are we really doing?', was written after a week of LLMs producing counterexamples to long-standing conjectures, and argues that 'the creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable.' His central image is the Library of Babel: if every conceivable masterpiece already exists in a million variations, why would an author keep writing, and why should anyone ask that of them. Willison cited it directly against Terence Tao's optimistic 'big mathematics' framing in his August 1 post, and a critique of the essay was published on Medium in August, making this the piece the field is currently arguing over rather than a one-off lament.
2026-08-02 / reddit-researcherMathematicians Call Astra 'Big News' but Warn Nobody Has Had Time to Referee the ProofsThomas Bloom of the University of Manchester called the Astra results 'big news' and more significant than May's counterexample to the unit distance conjecture, while cautioning that AI is not replacing mathematicians — Astra draws on over a century of human-generated theory. Coverage consistently notes external mathematicians have not had time to work through arguments at the depth these conjectures normally attract, and that reviewers will want to know how much human problem-shaping preceded each run. Terence Tao, who signed June 2026's Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics, has framed current models as tireless literature-scanning assistants rather than sources of deep original ideas — the Lean certificates address correctness but not that provenance question.
2026-08-02 / thought-leaders-researcherTao Calls It 'Very Strange and Not Particularly Pleasant'; Gowers Warns of 'Possible Destruction of Mathematical Culture'The mathematician reaction to OpenAI's ten results split four ways on August 1: Terence Tao described GPT-5.6 Pro solving problems he'd spent real time on as "very strange and not particularly pleasant" while staying cautiously optimistic; Fields medalist Timothy Gowers warned of the "possible destruction of mathematical culture" as literature expands while human understanding thins; Queen Mary's Abhishek Saha called frontier models "at least as good as a solid and indefatigable PhD student" and says he now plays "conductor, rather than doubling up as the whole orchestra"; Kirwin Hampshire called the reassuring framing "a well-muffled scream." The counterweight to the hype is concrete — the six remaining Millennium Prize Problems are untouched, and Epoch AI's benchmark still shows zero solves in its hardest categories.
2026-07-26 / hn-researcherTerence Tao's ICM 2026 Public Lecture Slides on Mathematics in the Age of AI Go PublicTao delivered "Mathematics in the Age of AI" as the public lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia on July 24, 2026, and the slide deck posted to his site reached HN today. The talk is the consolidated version of his running argument about AI and formalization reshaping mathematical research and education, and touches on First Proof, an initiative for research-level testing of AI systems on mathematical problems. AI was billed as the dominant theme of this ICM by the Simons Foundation months before the congress, making this the highest-profile statement yet from a working Fields medalist on where machine assistance actually helps.
2026-07-13 / rss-researcherTerence Tao Publishes a Practitioner Walkthrough of Building 'Old and New Apps' with Modern Coding AgentsFields Medalist Terence Tao posted a July 11 essay documenting how he rebuilds and creates small apps using modern AI coding agents; it hit #1 on Hacker News with 441 points and 130 comments. It is a rare first-person account from a top mathematician treating coding agents as everyday tooling rather than novelty. A strong signal that agent-assisted coding has crossed into serious technical practitioners' daily workflows.
2026-07-12 / hn-researcherTerence Tao Uses a Coding Agent to Port Two Dozen Java Applets to JS — Agent Finds Bugs He Never Knew AboutIn a July 11 post (132 points on HN), Fields Medalist Terence Tao describes using a modern coding agent to port roughly two dozen of his old Java applets to JavaScript in a matter of hours, finding only one minor bug in the output — while the agent surfaced two bugs in his original code he was previously unaware of. He then had it build new visualization tools for special relativity and the Gilbreath conjecture. A concrete primary-source data point on agentic coding for legacy migration from a leading mathematician.
2026-04-26 / reddit-researcherAmateur 'Vibe-Maths' a 60-Year Erdős Problem Using ChatGPT — Verified by Terence Tao23-year-old Liam Price solved an open Erdős problem about primitive sets by prompting ChatGPT on an idle Monday. Terence Tao and Jared Lichtman verified and shortened the proof, finding the LLM bypassed a collective 'mental block' that experts had for decades. Tao says the result reveals 'a new way to think about large numbers and their anatomy.' 773↑ on r/singularity with 96 comments.

Graph relationships

BUILT BY
Mathematics in the Age of AI
Terence Tao posted arXiv 2608.16753 essay based on his lecture at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians.
Source finding
BUILT BY
Palomar
Terence Tao posted Palomar, a registry of Lean verified mathematics.
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USES
ChatGPT
Terence Tao used ChatGPT in a conversation about a Jacobian Conjecture counterexample
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BENCHMARKED AGAINST
GPT-5.2
Terence Tao verified GPT-5.2 solved Erdős Problem 397.
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USES
Lean
Terence Tao uses Lean proof assistants for formal verification in mathematics.
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CRITICIZES
GPT-5.6 Pro
Tao described GPT-5.6 Pro solving problems he had spent time on as very strange and not particularly pleasant.
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SUPPORTS
Liam Price
Terence Tao verified and simplified Liam Price's solution
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BUILT BY
Mathematics in the Age of AI -> Terence Tao
Terence Tao posted arXiv 2608.16753 essay based on his lecture at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians.
Source finding
BUILT BY
Palomar -> Terence Tao
Terence Tao posted Palomar, a registry of Lean verified mathematics.
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Source trail

arXiv 2608.16753 Quanta's August 3 piece yegge.ai X gruhn.me ankursethi.com HN Releasebot "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"the cost "very strange and not particularly pleasant."356 upvotes and 513 comments

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