I'm not sure there is another profession in the world where it's impossible to explain to a layman on what the winners of their most prestigious award have worked on.
fwiw, I feel the same way about biology "Lysing action of the (1,2)b-carotene receptive encephalopathy pathway" type shit.
- Jacob Tsimerman: 2x IMO gold [1]
- Yu Deng: IMO gold [2]
- John Pardon: 3x IOI gold [3]
Fun fact: Tsimerman and Deng both overlapped with Peter Scholze (another Fields Medal recipient) at the IMO
[1] https://www.imo-official.org/results/contestant/7387/
He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.
So he goes away sour;
And, 'tis said, to this hour
Declares that he's no taste for grapes.
"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.
"Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
"But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.
I don't know, maybe. I would not put Clankers on the same level (or category / level of importance) as people but if they produce the work maybe they should get the credit.
I asked chatgpt to write a poem about my mothers dog a while back. It spit out a poem that my mother likes and keeps around. When asked, I say chatgpt wrote it. If I asked chatgpt for a proof of the Goldbach Conjecture and it spit out a verifiable proof, I think I would go ahead and give chatgpt credit. Not that I think it is likely. It would be more of some ability (like a robot end effector is able to hold an egg) and monkeys at typewriters.
Maybe not Fields Medal worthy, but worthy of some credit.
This is not as radical as it sounds. People did stuff like that all the time pre-LLM. It's just a question of how fussy the journal's editor is. See https://www.wired.com/2013/03/computers-and-math/ for examples in math.
HN discussion on that article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5322313
i’d like to revise my earlier comment: 2022 may have been the last time we had pure humans win a Fields Medal.
I’m fairly certain this batch's winners used LLMs for research, lit-revews, reviewing work, and calculations... perhaps not enough to count as a co-author, but still enough to handle a lot of the grunt work.
Who would have imagined the pace of progress in LLM-powered math..
- winners in the 30s were the last time we have pure human to win (before computer)
- winners in the 70s were the last time we have pure human to win (before internet)
- winners in the 90s were the last time we have pure human to win (before search engine)
Why can't we treat LLMs as just another tool like computers, search engines, computing libraries? Why do people keep trying to anthropomorphizing these binaries?
People in the 1800s used to win awards and acclamation by simply hand-cranking numbers for popular calculations (Pi, error functions, etc.) and printing them in a book. This will just be the same thing.
"A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence"
(Jacob Tsimerman, Andrew Critch)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369