Tao has experienced increased productivity not uniformly but selectively: auxiliary tasks like literature searches, generating plots and figures, and formatting have been dramatically accelerated (5x faster), while the core mathematical work of solving difficult problems remains largely unaccelerated, and this is changing the nature of papers to include more supplementary material rather than solving harder problems.

factualpending

Speaker

Terence Tao

Evidence Quote

The core of what I do, actually solving the most difficult part of a math problem, hasn't changed too much. I still use pen and paper for that... It's made the papers richer and broader, but not necessarily deeper.

Source

Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AIDwarkesh Patel
Created: 8/12/2026, 6:05:48 PM

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