Something Weird Is Happening in Math

Why one of the world's best mathematicians is joining OpenAI One of the winners of this year's Fields Medal is headed to OpenAI. Last Thursday, Jacob Tsimerman was one of four mathematicians awarded the prestigious honor, which is sometimes called the Nobel Prize of mathematics. The same day that he won the Fields, Tsimerman announced that he would be going on leave from the University of Toronto to work on AI safety. As my colleague Rose Horowitch and I wrote last week, top AI companies now employ a range of academics, including physicists, philosophers, economists, and, of course, mathematicians . But given Tsimerman's renown, his decision in particular seemed to catch many people by surprise. "It's like hiring Lionel Messi as project manager," one machine-learning professor posted on X. Tsimerman's expertise is in number theory, and he won the Fields for his work on the André-Oort conjecture, among other contributions.