Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on October 28, citing Jiemian News, that Fields Medal laureate and University of Chicago professor Yu Deng recently shared his thoughts on mathematical research in the AI era at a forum.
Quoting Pascal’s famous saying, “Man is a thinking reed,” Deng said that if humans give up their ability to think for themselves because they have AI, they really will be no different from animals. Deng cautioned against relying too heavily on tools and abandoning independent thought: if people willingly hand over the right to think entirely to AI and become AI’s dogs, they will lose their most essential quality.
He added that mathematics is the purest discipline for testing and demonstrating humanity’s capacity for independent thought and exploration. Whether or not it is the AI era, mathematics will always be a key vehicle for that capacity. He therefore firmly believes that mathematics will never disappear in the AI era: “If that really happened, I think it would probably be a tragedy for humanity as a whole.”
As IT Home previously reported, Deng received the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Philadelphia, United States, on July 23, 2026. His central contribution was solving the sixth Hilbert problem in the narrow sense, making him one of the first Chinese nationals to receive the award.
Publicly available information shows that the Fields Medal is named after Canadian mathematician John Charles Fields and is awarded at the International Mathematical Union’s International Congress of Mathematicians. It is the highest honor in international mathematics. Because there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, it has been called the “Nobel Prize of mathematics.”
The Fields Medal recognizes groundbreaking work with the greatest originality, transformative impact and potential. It also has a strict age limit of under 40, is awarded only once every 4 years and goes to no more than 4 people each time. As a result, only a few dozen people worldwide have received the medal in nearly 100 years, making it far rarer than the Nobel Prize.
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