On 6 October, James Maynard was nervously checking his phone under the table throughout dinner. He’d heard rumors of a tsunami heading for the shores of math. When he checked in one last time from bed, the swell struck: OpenAI had released more than 700 math papers, generated with an advanced version of its AI model. They appeared to topple hundreds of long-standing problems, forcing researchers to face the reality that no problem in math is off-limits for machines. At first, Maynard, a mathematician at the University of Oxford and recipient of the Fields Medal, math’s most prestigious prize, feared for colleagues whose work would be upended. But then he spotted a paper that offered progress on one of his favorite pastimes: the Riemann hypothesis, a puzzle about prime numbers and one of seven famed Millennium Prize Problems, often considered the most formidable in all of math. “I was like a kid at Christmas,” Maynard says. “Even if it was some scary monster giving me a gift, I was just so excited.” The release comes less than 1 month after OpenAI announced a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations, another Millennium Prize Problem. OpenAI’s latest proof solves only a weaker version of the Riemann hypothesis. But Maynard, who made the most recent notable Riemann advance in 2024, says it is “groundbreaking” and likely to have payoffs for other problems across math. “Within analytic number theory, it’s obviously the best headline result for the past 100 years in the field.” Learn more: scim.ag/4s9F8Ip

Why would you listen to self reported over revealed

A US investigation into nine universities’ employment of international researchers is prompting concerns among academics at the campuses go.nature.com/4ig8i4a

"Academics launch rival inquiry Committee for Academic Freedom will examine [whether Jason Arday’s] employment at Cambridge met expected standards" (Times) I’ll submit my own assessment of Arday's illiterate thesis. It failed to meet expected standards for PhD, let alone a Cambridge professorship.

Held to higher standards. Left off invitations. Pointed to as “diversity” but ignored. These are just some of the hundreds of examples of devaluation women faculty in the United States shared with computational social scientist Katie Spoon. These experiences, more common for women than men, are to blame for the higher rate of attrition for women faculty, Spoon and colleagues report in a new analysis. Learn more: scim.ag/4hOhcH1 @NewsfromScience

Economist @MazzucatoM: "If bankers, estate agents and bookmakers claim to create value rather than extract it, mainstream economics offers no basis on which to challenge them, even though the public might view their claims with scepticism. Who can deny Lloyd Blankfein when he declares that Goldman Sachs employees are among the most productive in the world? Or when pharmaceutical companies argue that the exorbitantly high price of one of their drugs is due to the value it produces? Government officials can become convinced (or ‘captured’) by stories about wealth creation, as was recently evidenced by the US government’s approval of a leukemia drug treatment at half a million dollars, precisely using the ‘ value- based pricing’ model pitched by the industry – even when the taxpayer contributed $200 million dollars towards its discovery." Read more: evonomics.com/value-of-every…

Interacting with attractive women makes men stupid. The researchers found that even a few minutes with the attractive woman was enough to make the students slower and less accurate on the test. The more attracted they were, the worse their results. They also studied the effects on women students of being in the company of handsome men, and found the test scores were unaffected. sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

Cornell just produced a massive new report on higher education noting that companies have a “jarring” skepticism of higher ed thanks to a new generation of degree holders who lack key skills like handling uncertainty, compromising, and absorbing feedback. Faculty also report that incoming students, despite four years of undergraduate education, are “underdeveloped” in these relational or interpersonal skills. This is a serious crises in higher education and the report calls for a greater need for conflict-resolution training. We need to do a better job training our students to deal with these issues. These are traditionally the skills students developed in higher education. I loved college because it challenged me, sparked debate, and required me to grapple with complexity. This should be an essential part of college--inside and outside the classroom. chronicle.com/article/compan…

Cauchy was a legitimist and a coward, he refused to abide by the new regime after the failed July revolution in 1830 and flew to Germany. He was a rich ass who emigrated to evade tax. He would be delighted to know his results can be used to generate infinite imaginary money.