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Twenty five Fields medalists were initial signatories of the letter “ A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics ” in which they opine that “The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned”. They are right.

As they say, the goals of AI companies do not seem to be aligned with “the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight”, and indeed, the “solutions [by AI companies] are [being] announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others.” This is true (but ironically, the signatories themselves say they released their letter quickly because they “did not have the time to have a more consultative process.”)

It is also true that the goals of the mathematics community do not seem to be aligned with “the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight”. This is clear, because if that were the goal, then the mathematics community would hold the view that “the most precious resources of [its] profession are students and ideas”, and that they would be “nurture[d] with great care”. But sadly students and ideas in mathematics have not been nurtured with great care.

Since the letter by the twenty five Fields medalists seems to have been precipitated by the OpenAI announcement a solution to the Navier Stokes existence and smoothness problem , let’s take a look at how the mathematics community has nurtured some of the students who worked in that area, and their foundational ideas.

Of course every mathematician knows that the mathematics community does not nurture with great care all of its students and ideas. This is not a secret and it’s not an open secret. It’s just common knowledge. In the mathematics department at UC Berkeley, where I worked for 18 years, the department went from barring Julia Robinson ( Hilbert’s tenth problem ) from teaching mathematics for 35 years (also using the nepotism rule as an excuse and agreeing to appoint her only after she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976) to hiring Yuval Pere s (Berkeley math professor ~2001 – 2011). A particularly shocking detail about Robinson is that she was required to document to the personnel office exactly what she worked on every single day (!) In Peres’ case eventually mathematicians publicly described at least seven cases or reports involving junior women, some of whom reportedly avoided conferences or lectures to escape his repeated advances. It was not surprising to me that just three years after I arrived at the UC Berkeley math department, the department lost an important NSF grant specifically due to poor student mentorship . And it’s outrageous that there is still a prominent faculty member at UC Berkeley (now emeritus) who even today insists there is no, and never has been, sexism in mathematics . One of the defining moments for me in the department was when a graduate student who I knew only in passing, came to my office in tears to tell me “I’ve just been told I’m stupid” (she is now a very successful professor of mathematics). I’d heard this insult made many times in the department. Once at a faculty meeting a senior professor was asked what he was doing to help one of his graduate students who was in his 9th or 10th year. The reply was “I’m doing nothing. He’s stupid”. These are not isolated anecdotes. Many mathematicians have experienced rejection not only of their ideas, but of themselves. Perhaps one of the most egregious examples is Yitang Zhang who was told by his advisor “ no Chinese student is good “. Was this “nurture with great care”?

I found it interesting that the 25 primary signatories on the “ A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics ” signed the letter with “Fields medalist” in parenthesis. Why not their affiliation, or email address? Did they highlight that they are Fields medal winners to imply that the honor bestows upon them some kind of authority on the mathematics community? Sure- they all did some incredibly important mathematics and were recognized based on extraordinary mathematical ability. But receipt of a Fields Medal also depends on the judgments of a tiny group about which problems, fields, and styles of mathematics deserve recognition. Erdős remarked that “ Szemerédi should have gotten a Fields Medal. [But] the people who decide are not that interested in combinatorics .” Indeed, prizes encode judgments about which mathematics, and therefore which mathematicians, matter. But regardless of Fields medal politics, the point is that mathematical ability is not the same as mathematical responsibility. Perhaps instead of foregrounding Fields medalists in a letter about “alignment,” it would have been more illuminating to hear from mathematicians whose careers were derailed by lack of mentorship and nurturing .