Wednesday, November 12, 2025, 7 pm Palestine time
Prof. Timothy Gowers, (Collège de France, University of Cambridge)
Title: How Will Artificial Intelligence Change Mathematical Research?
Abstract: In the last few years, with the arrival of large language models (LLMs), there has been a revolution in artificial intelligence, which looks likely to have a profound influence on many human activities, including mathematical research. Three years ago it was unthinkable for a computer to solve a competition-level mathematics problem: in 2025 several teams created programs that reached gold-medal standard in the International Mathematical Olympiad. Does this mean that a couple of years from now computers will be solving research-level open problems? I cannot give a definitive answer to the question, but will discuss some of the factors on which the answer seems likely to depend.
Bio: Timothy Gowers was an undergraduate at Trinity College Cambridge, continuing as a PhD student, supervised by Béla Bollobás and specializing in the geometry of Banach spaces, and then as a research fellow. After four years as a lecturer at University College London he moved back to Cambridge in 1995 as a lecturer and then the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics. During this time his interests turned more towards additive combinatorics. In 2009 he became a Royal Society Research Professor, and then in 2020 took up a chair in combinatorics at the Collège de France, which he combines with a part-time position at Cambridge. In 1998 he was awarded a Fields Medal and in 2012 he was knighted for services to mathematics.