{"id":136289,"date":"2026-05-04T10:00:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T14:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/?p=136289"},"modified":"2026-05-04T11:11:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T15:11:21","slug":"ai-will-be-top-of-mind-at-icm-maths-biggest-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/2026\/05\/04\/ai-will-be-top-of-mind-at-icm-maths-biggest-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Will Be Top of Mind at ICM, Math\u2019s Biggest Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":432,"featured_media":136292,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[181],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mathematics-and-physical-science","news_type-article"],"acf":{"block_editor":[{"acf_fc_layout":"image","type":"image_large","image":136290,"title":"University of California, Los Angeles professor Terence Tao will give a lecture at ICM on how AI and formalization will change mathematical research and education while focusing on what makes mathematics a human endeavor.","caption":"David Esquivel, UCLA","caption_full":"","less_margin":false},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":"Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the landscape of mathematics. Recently, for instance, a 23-year-old used ChatGPT to concisely solve <a href=\"https:\/\/www.erdosproblems.com\/1196\">Erd\u0151s Problem #1196<\/a> \u2014 a challenge that had gone unsolved for 60 years \u2014 in just over 80 minutes.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s no surprise, then, that AI will be top of mind for many of the thousands of mathematicians who will gather in Philadelphia this July for the world\u2019s most prestigious math conference. At the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.icm2026.org\/\">International Congress of Mathematicians <\/a>(ICM), established in 1897 and held every four years, the world\u2019s leading mathematicians discuss the field\u2019s hottest topics during talks, workshops and casual hallway conversations.\r\n\r\nThis year, AI will be discussed in public lectures, special lectures and research talks. Some of the buzz comes from projects that enable mathematicians to write and formalize proofs using machine-verifiable code. Other conversations will focus on how AI is changing math education and how it can help preserve and encourage the beautiful, creative human efforts of mathematics.\r\n<h2>Preserving the Human Element<\/h2>\r\nTerence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles will give a public lecture, \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2603.26524\">Mathematics in the Age of AI<\/a>,\u201d that exemplifies that ethos. Tao will explain how AI and formalization will change mathematical research and education while focusing on what makes mathematics a human endeavor.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019ll be talking about ... why it is important that the distinctively human features of our profession are not lost in this transformation, and that we are more explicitly aware of all the broader goals of mathematics, not just the ones that can be efficiently resolved by computers,\u201d says Tao, who won the prestigious Fields Medal at the 2006 ICM.\r\n\r\nOne broad goal over the past century or so has been interdisciplinary work: either finding a \u2018grand theory\u2019 of mathematics or connecting math to other sciences. For instance, in 2024, mathematician Robert Ghrist asked an AI agent where he could apply a particular abstraction, and it suggested financial networks. Ghrist then spent a year learning about that field and published a paper in it.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis is normally very difficult to do, because mathematicians and scientists often speak very different languages,\u201d says Ghrist, an associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania. \u201cAI is potentially going to lead to a real renaissance in applied math, where pure mathematicians who are domain experts are now going to have the perfect conversation partner to be able to take their ideas and connect them with real-world things.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","type":"image_medium","image":136291,"title":"Robert Ghrist, an associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that AI will allow mathematicians to take their ideas and connect them with real-world things.","caption":"Eric Sucar, University of Pennsylvania","caption_full":"","less_margin":false},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":"<h2>AI Assistants for Discovery<\/h2>\r\nFormalization is another, more recent goal. In a full-circle moment, Rutgers University mathematician Alex Kontorovich will use <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2510.15924\">his ICM plenary lecture<\/a> to address auto-formalization, in which AI formalizes canonical math knowledge, was popularized at the 2022 ICM. The sooner AI and humans formalize known math, Kontorovich says, the sooner a broader set of researchers can use AI to assist with mathematical discovery. Evangelists such as Kontorovich \u2014 who serves on the strategic advisory board for the proof assistant Lean \u2014 have already begun integrating AI into their work at a basic level.\r\n\r\n\u201cMy starting point was some complicated bit of algebra,\u201d Kontorovich says of his motivations for exploring AI. \u201cI can do it by hand on paper, and there\u2019s a good chance I\u2019ll make a mistake. So I\u2019ll do it five times until I get the same answer twice. Or I can stick it into [software], and it just verifies that one of those calculations is the right one. I\u2019m never wasting my time again rechecking this calculation.\u201d\r\n\r\nBesides contributing to a formalized library of mathematical knowledge, AI increasingly serves as a reference librarian. Brandeis University graduate student Vasiliy Neckrasov, who will deliver a short talk at the ICM, uses AI regularly in his research.\r\n\r\n\u201cIntuitively, it looked like it should be true and it should be known,\u201d Neckrasov says of a fact he needed for his research but did not know himself. \u201cIf you write the prompt in a detailed enough way, pretty often, AI will give you more than just [searching] \u2014 it will give you some lemmas formulated maybe in a different way, statements that you do not expect to find just by keywords, but which answer exactly what you need.\u201d\r\n<h2>Supporting Education<\/h2>\r\nAI also eases the everyday bureaucracy of teaching: Neckrasov uses it to generate different versions of problem sets or tests that yield \u2018nice\u2019 numbers. More broadly, AI has already affected several aspects of mathematics education, including tutoring, personalizing learning and providing calculation assistance. A roundtable on \u201cMathematics Education in the AI Era\u201d will include panelist Florence Gabriel. Gabriel, a math education expert, says that while AI products and tools are helpful, she wants to focus more on the \u201cdeeply human skills\u201d involved in math.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhat is particularly new and promising is the growing recognition that AI can be designed to support students\u2019 emotional experiences as they learn,\u201d says Gabriel, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning at Adelaide University in Australia. \u201cOur recent work shows how AI could help address challenges such as mathematics anxiety by using students\u2019 inputs to identify signs of frustration or disengagement during learning and respond in more supportive ways.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe \u2018deeply human\u2019 element of learning and researching math is precisely why, despite the rise of digital tools, the physical gathering in Philadelphia remains so vital. Kontorovich remarks that attending daily department tea sessions catalyzes research and that mathematicians forge fruitful connections at conferences like the ICM.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s those spontaneous interactions that would never happen in an orchestrated way that make [research] unlock,\u201d explains Kontorovich, who will give a plenary lecture on the future of AI and math. \u201cIt\u2019s a completely different experience to randomly bump into people and have synapses firing in all kinds of strange directions. That is exactly why we all need to be there in person to exchange mathematical ideas.\u201d"}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136289"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/432"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136289"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":136444,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136289\/revisions\/136444"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}