Academic community has the tools to grapple with emerging technology
I applaud graduate students Dora Woodruff, Hanna Mularczyk, and Anna Brandenberger for mobilizing their department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to address the rapidly changing landscape of mathematics (“What’s the point of MIT? Open AI’s math proofs have thrown students and researchers into chaos,” Oct. 15). Many of us in the mathematics community feel unmoored by AI’s impact on the field, but our training and passion supply us with valuable tools for charting the unknown. What we need is to come together to take on these issues as a community.
Grass-roots collective efforts like theirs, as well as the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics, the Proofs and Prompts blog, and the First Proof research effort, provide a way forward. For my part, exploring these issues with colleagues and students at my home institution, Wellesley College, gives me hope.
What’s the point of MIT and other similar academic spaces? Vibrant communities that care deeply about producing and promulgating shared human understanding.
Karen Lange
Professor of mathematics
Wellesley College
The writer holds a doctoral degree in mathematics. The views expressed here are her own.
Don’t overlook math’s practical contributions to our everyday lives
The article on AI and graduate students in mathematics focused on high-level abstract math as theory that is disconnected from the real world.
Higher math has enormous uses, affecting every element of our lives, from cellphones, online purchases, and brain scans to satellite navigation systems.
At a time when the value of science is under attack in the United States, the article has done a disservice to the brilliant scholars dedicated to this field by overlooking the practical contributions of math.
Betsy Millard
Hingham