The Institut de France's main assembly hall could barely accommodate the flood of teachers, researchers and students who had come to attend the ceremony.
After a few introductory remarks in French by mathematician Étienne Ghys, permanent secretary of the venerable institution, Tao gave a twenty-minute talk in English on computer-assisted proofs. Improvements in algorithms and ongoing advances in artificial intelligence (AI) give him hope that mathematicians will soon have "digital assistants" that are more than mere gadgets. Eventually, they could help identify coincidences across disparate datasets, suggest proof methods, and help draft an initial version of a research paper…
The next short talk, also delivered in English, presented a more pessimistic outlook: the British mathematician Timothy Gowers, a professor at the Collège de France, seems convinced that AI will supplant mathematicians in the near future because it will be able to perform every aspect of their teaching and research, including those involving creativity or intuition.
