Top all-time · #63
Terence Tao
Personal blog · terrytao.wordpress.commathsciencecareer
Terence Tao writes What's new, a personal blog at terrytao.wordpress.com about math, science and career. Since 2007, 517 different Hacker News readers have linked it 813 times, most often “There's more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 7 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Terence Tao's blog for his career advice on mathematics, such as 'There's more to mathematics than rigour and proofs', and for his posts on AI and math. Comments mostly cite these posts as support.
- Recommended for · 7 comments
- Called 'full of insight' and 'great'; readers recommend his career advice and say to read his posts, and one says 'which I really liked'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Updates on my research and expository papers, discussion of open problems, and other maths-related topics. By Terence Tao
Most-linked posts?
- There's more to mathematics than rigour and proofs (2007)36 people · 38 mentions · first linked 2018-02-16
- Does one have to be a genius to do maths? (2007)28 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2015-03-07
- Nines of safety: a proposed unit of measurement of risk25 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2013-01-13
- There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2015-03-09
- Does one have to be a genius to do maths?10 people · 13 mentions · first linked 2007-12-31
- Work Hard (2007)10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2017-03-30
- /10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2007-12-31
- Formalizing the proof of PFR in Lean4 using Blueprint: a short tour10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2023-11-19
- How to assign partial credit on an exam of true-false questions?9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-06-02
- There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2012-11-11
What Hacker News says?
This eulogy makes more sense and rings true: "Conway was arguably an extreme point in the convex hull of all mathematicians. He will very much be missed." - Terence Tao Source: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/john-conway/
Comment linking /2020/04/12/john-conway/
on “John Conway has died”Submitted John Conway as a story · 627 points
HN discussionConfirmation in local news: https://dailyvoice.com/new-jersey/mercer/obituaries/covid-19... And on Terry Tao's blog: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/04/12/john-conway/ And of course on Wikipedia now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Horton_Conway
Comment linking /2020/04/12/john-conway/
on “John Conway has died”Submitted Eigenvectors from eigenvalues as a story · 529 points
HN discussionI don't think that computers have an advantage because they can navigate search spaces efficiently. The search space for difficult theorems is gigantic. Proving them often relies on a combination of experience with rigorous mathematics and very good intuition [1] as well as many, many steps. One example is the classification of all finite simple groups [2], which took about 200 years and a lot of small steps. I gues…
Comment linking /career-advice/theres-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/
on “AI solves International Math Olympiad problems at silver medal level”Submitted If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it as a story · 433 points
HN discussionFor now I think more or less the same thing as with all recent math announcements: This is in a range where human work still exists (see Terry Tao, (1)). I wonder whether the trend will extend into the problems that (as far as I can tell) are considered complete brick walls right now -- P vs. NP, Collatz, Goldbach, odd perfect numbers, problems that aren't part of any research program. (2) In other words, is the pro…
Comment linking /2019/09/10/almost-all-collatz-orbits-attain-almost-bounded-values/
on “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem”Submitted Work Hard (2007) as a story · 416 points
HN discussionYou have expressed a few different ideas, so I will address them separately. > It's not about whether the conjectures themselves are interesting or not, or whether people simply have enough time. Tao seems to think otherwise, if I am reading him correctly: I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of thes…
Comment linking /2026/09/11/a-severe-misalignment-of-ai-in-mathematics/
on “A misalignment of AI in mathematics”Submitted We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians as a story · 408 points
HN discussionIt's not about whether the conjectures themselves are interesting or not, or whether people simply have enough time. It's that a bare proof made by a machine doesn't actually do much for us. There is not some set of problems that, once finished, will amount to some kind of final, correct system and we can call it a day and, like, utilize it. "Mathematics" is the people doing it (the "mathematical community" Tao refe…
Comment linking /2026/09/11/a-severe-misalignment-of-ai-in-mathematics/
on “A misalignment of AI in mathematics”Submitted Masterclass on mathematical thinking as a story · 305 points
HN discussionYou should read his comment from wednesday here: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/finite-time-blowup... And yes, at one point it gives you right about them taking advantage of him. He sat down for an interview and found later that they just used the "best clips" out of it for an OpenAI ad.
on “A misalignment of AI in mathematics”Submitted Why do we need human mathematicians anymore? as a story · 293 points
HN discussionOpenAI's proof goes down a completely different route than the route taken for Kakeya in three dimensions and also the existing proof of local smoothing in two dimensions. Hong Wang and Josh Zahl proved something a bit stronger, namely that the Kakeya conjecture holds for families of tubes satisfying the "Convex Wolff Axioms". From the outside this looks like a weird technical detail but if you unpack this you get a…
Comment linking /2014/05/07/stickiness-graininess-planiness-and-a-sum-product-approach-to-the-kakeya-problem/
on “Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics”Submitted A Lean companion to Analysis I as a story · 292 points
HN discussionat the opposite extreme, we should not always rely on logic and rigor when doing math - https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s...
Comment linking /career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/
on “Calculus Made Easy (1914) [pdf]”Submitted Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale as a story · 273 points
HN discussionExcellent work! I've been trying to get my mother (she's a physics teacher) to learn linear algebra properly for a long time. Artin didn't work (ha), Khan Academy moved too slow/bored her, but she seems interested in this. It's important to appreciate how useful it might be to make math "tangible". Sure, someone who can define a manifold by saying "oh, put charts on it, locally diffeo blah blah" probably has a good…
Comment linking /career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/
on “Immersive Linear Algebra – textbook with fully interactive figures (2015)”Submitted Ask yourself dumb questions and answer them (2020) as a story · 228 points
HN discussionI'd recommend reading Tao's blog post "There’s more to mathematics than rigour and proofs": https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...
Comment linking /career-advice/theres-more-to-mathematics-than-rigour-and-proofs/
on “A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics”Submitted Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it as a story · 224 points
HN discussionWell I am studying mathematics, and I use the LLM to help me learn. They aren't terrible, and they have all of arXiv to train on. Terrence Tao is doing some cool stuff with it - the idea will be an LLM to generate Lean proofs. https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113132502735585408 https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2024/12/05/ai-for-math-fund/ (Professor Tao is probably the best or at least most productive in the most fields cu…
Comment linking /2024/12/05/ai-for-math-fund/
on “Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? How to thrive in a ChatGPT world”Submitted What mathematicians should know about the Lean Theorem Prover: reliability & AI as a story · 210 points
HN discussionI run such tests since a long time at chorasimilarity open notebook. I always used guest non login accounts. As a mathematician I was able to check two plagiates (by humans) with even such primitive means. But I have to mention that some things irk me in this conversation about math or science and AI. First, I see lots of attribution and other related problems, with certain impact for the researcher proffesion. But…
Comment linking /2026/09/10/crowdsourcing-a-list-of-general-resources-on-ai-and-mathematics/
on “More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math”Submitted Why are we even doing all this? as a story · 206 points
HN discussionTerry Tao's a mathematician and he seems to think their ideas are interesting: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/biases-between-con...
Comment linking /2016/03/14/biases-between-consecutive-primes/
on “A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers”Submitted Write a rapid prototype first (2007) as a story · 203 points
HN discussionAbsolutely. No matter how gifted a person is, there is going to be some point in their lives or some domain where pure talent will be insufficient. Even super geniuses like Terence Tao struggled (he nearly did not pass his generals). https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/living-proof-stori... https://web.math.princeton.edu/generals/tao_terence The American Mathematical Society has a PDF of essays of brilliant ma…
Comment linking /2019/06/27/living-proof-stories-of-resilience-along-the-mathematical-journey/
on “You are not dumb, you just lack the prerequisites”Submitted Problem solving strategies in a graduate real analysis course (2010) as a story · 197 points
HN discussion
