Terence Tao

But now it's quite possible at the high school level or whatever that you could get involved in math project and actually make a real contribution because of all these AI tools and Lean and everything else.

So there'll be a lot of non-traditional opportunities to learn.

So you need a very adaptable mindset.

You know, there'll be room for pursuing things just for curiosity, for playing around.

And I mean, you still need to get your credentials for, I mean, I think for a while it'll still be important to sort of still go through traditional education and learn math and science the old-fashioned way for a while.

But

Yeah, but you should also be open to very, very different ways of doing science, some of which don't exist yet.

Yeah, so it's a scary time, but also very exciting.

No, it predates me, but certainly that title helped me accept the position.

Yeah, so I'm not the main director, but I'm the director of what's called special projects.

So IPAM is an institute that brings together pure mathematicians and applied mathematicians and scientists and people from industry to work on topics where it's time for mathematics to get involved.

So, for example, we hold very early workshops and conferences on AI, deep fakes, self-driving cars, many years before they became a reality.

And often industry people were working on these problems, but they were blocked by various mathematical obstacles and they needed mathematicians to talk to.

So we create these programs where we just have lots of experts in different fields in the same room, listening to talks and just socializing.

And good things happen.

I once talked with an electrical engineer and statistician 20 years ago in one of these programs, and we ended up finding a new way to do MRI scans that's actually 10 times faster than traditional scans.

In fact, now all the modern MRI machines use our algorithms.

Right.

I think when they make them faster, they trade it off for more detail.

So they can get a more detailed image of you.