Terence Tao


Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast
Jun 14, 2025

Terence Tao is widely considered to be one of the greatest mathematicians in history. He won the Fields Medal and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, and has contributed to a wide range of fields from fluid dynamics with Navier-Stokes equations to mathematical physics & quantum mechanics, prime numbers & analytics number theory, harmonic analysis, compressed sensing, random matrix theory, combinatorics, and progress on many of the hardest problems in the history of mathematics.

OUTLINE:

0:00 - Introduction
0:49 - First hard problem
6:16 - Navier–Stokes singularity
26:26 - Game of life
33:01 - Infinity
38:07 - Math vs Physics
44:26 - Nature of reality
1:07:09 - Theory of everything
1:13:10 - General relativity
1:16:37 - Solving difficult problems
1:20:01 - AI-assisted theorem proving
1:32:51 - Lean programming language
1:42:51 - DeepMind's AlphaProof
1:47:45 - Human mathematicians vs AI
1:57:37 - AI winning the Fields Medal
2:04:47 - Grigori Perelman
2:17:30 - Twin Prime Conjecture
2:34:04 - Collatz conjecture
2:40:50 - P = NP
2:43:43 - Fields Medal
2:51:18 - Andrew Wiles and Fermat's Last Theorem
2:55:16 - Productivity
2:57:55 - Advice for young people
3:06:17 - The greatest mathematician of all time
 

Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI

Mar 20, 2026

We begin the episode with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion.

People sometimes say that AI will make especially fast progress at scientific discovery because of tight verification loops. But the story of how we discovered the shape of our solar system shows how the verification loop for correct ideas can be decades (or even millennia) long.

During this time, what we know today as the better theory can often actually make worse predictions (Copernicus's model of circular orbits around the sun was actually less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model). And the reasons it survives this epistemic hell is some mixture of judgment and heuristics that we don’t even understand well enough to actually articulate, much less codify into an RL loop.
 
Back
Top