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Terence Tao

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
2047 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

It's so incredible.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

A lot of this was like community crowdsourced by like amateur mathematicians, actually.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

So I knew about that work.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

And so that is part of what inspired me to propose the same thing with Navier-Stokes.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

Now it was a much, as I said, analog is much worse than digital.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

Like it's going to be,

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

You can't just directly take the constructions from the game of life and plunk them in.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

But again, it shows it's possible.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

the thing is you can get this emergent very complicated structures but only with very carefully prepared initial conditions yeah so so these these these glider guns and and gates and and software machines if you just plunk down randomly some cells and you when they get left you'll not see any of these um and that's the analogous situation of navier-stokes again you know that that with with typical initial conditions you will not have any of this weird computation going on um but

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

basically through engineering, you know, by specially designing things in a very special way, you can make clever constructions.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

This is a recurring challenge in mathematics that I call the dichotomy between structure and randomness.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

That most objects that you can generate in mathematics are random.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

They look like random, like the digits of pi.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

Well,

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

we believe is a good example but there's a very small number of things that have patterns but now you can prove something as a pattern by just constructing you know like if something has a simple pattern and you have a proof that it does something like repeat itself every so often you can do that but

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

And you can prove that most sequences of digits have no pattern.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

So if you just pick digits randomly, there's something called low-large numbers.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

It tells you you're going to get as many ones as twos in the long run.

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

But we have a lot fewer tools to, if I give you a specific pattern, like the digits of pi,

Lex Fridman Podcast
#472 โ€“ Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI

How can I show that this doesn't have some weird pattern to it?