Requiem for a Field?

Kevin Hartnett posted the following Friday: My profile of @Jacob_Tsimerman, published the morning he won the Fields Medal, and hours before he announced he’s going to @OpenAI, reads like a requiem for a field. While I’m trying to not spend too much time thinking about the ongoing story of the effect of AI agents on math, the story of Jacob Tsimerman’s Fields medal award coinciding with his announcement that he’s leaving research math to go work of OpenAI is hard to ignore. If you do want to spend time thinking about the implications of this, it’s worth reading the profiles at the New York Times as well as Hartnett’s at Quanta Magazine. Also very much worth reading is Tsimerman’s own explanation (in an exchange with Daniel Litt) of how he sees things. This was written before the OpenAI announcement, but goes a ways towards explaining Tsimerman’s decision. A few personal comments: I’ve never had any interest in the kind of competitive problem solving Tsimerman specializes in, so have no…