Some AI + mathematics things I read recently and am mulling below. I've been struggling to pull these and various threads on the topic into a cogent whole, even if only for myself, because the developments have been coming fast and thick, with no indications they will slow in
Recently had a chance to rewatch Good Will Hunting, and thought Robin Williams's heart-rending speech to Matt Damon on the bench in the park is something we could also recount to AI, and to ourselves so that we remember what AI really is, and have it be
Isn't it wild that we've reached a situation where people who are most ❊pro❊ AI say “this technology we love and build has like a 10% chance of killing us all” and the people who are ❊anti❊ AI reply “there's no way this figure
My sister Swathi Murali has her first peer-reviewed paper out, expected in print in the December 2026 edition of Forensic Chemistry. Excerpt from the abstract: Electrical tapes may be submitted to forensic laboratories for analysis concerning their utilization in the construction of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). However, post-blast
While I was recently browsing the web for interesting physics papers, I came across one in Nature titled ‘A thermodynamically favoured molecular computer’. The work itself seemed interesting but what caught my eye was a pair of lines in the abstract: “… computation can be embedded in a system relaxing to
When I was talking about this post with a friend, he asked a thought-provoking question. In the post, I’d argued that I believe it should be appropriate for mathematics to consider a solution to a problem to be illegitimate if mathematicians had arrived at it with help from
Despite some problems of its own, the ongoing Microsoft Majorana saga has been striking a pleasant contrast with the rush by artificial intelligence (AI) companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to show their proprietary models can do research-level mathematics. Of course, experts verify an experiment in condensed matter physics and
A particular line from the open statement mathematicians wrote against the design of the latest Caltech Mathathon, due to happen in late October, has stuck with me: Mathematicians do not only prove theorems: they also take measures to ensure that the future of a field remains healthy after the extraction
There’s a passage in an interview of former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, published by Frontline on September 1, that many people seem to have misunderstood, especially on Twitter, where — perhaps unsurprisingly — it has been reduced to “India shouldn’t make chips because it can smuggle them in instead”. Excerpt:
From 'Why not normalise use of AI in writing?', by Amit Kumar, assistant professor in the Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh, in The Hindu, August 29, 2026: Whose authority is being protected by that resistance and challenged, if AI writing gets the green signal? With a good
My friend Dhiya has been writing and publishing one blog post every week for the last 87 weeks in a series she simply calls ‘dilettante’. The eighty-fifth edition focused on an issue I am currently engaged deeply with at work: as a journalist trying to make their team’s
On August 24, Levent Alpöge (@__alpoge__) posted on X.com that they had solved a maths problem with Claude’s help in a way that was contrary to a human proof of it, albeit a reputedly unsatisfactory one. Let us set aside the validity of the new proof. In one
Analysis
The following is a review of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination by Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, available here. The authors write, and I agree, that journalism has spent 25 years on a “hamster wheel” of technologies — web, then social media, then
Analysis
Indian society has inhabited at least three distinct structures of feeling in relation to science since independence — and they are not as continuous as one might expect.
Analysis
1. India is not likely to find success by regulating hardware because (i) such regulations will be hard to enforce in practice and in principle, (ii) the regulatory regime could set up a new license raj, and (iii) the regulations will age very poorly when similar technological capabilities come to
Op-eds
Dear Chief Justice Surya Kant: I commend you for your discovery this week that time is finite. On Wednesday, when a petitioner confronted you with video evidence of police brutality on July 20 against the students protesting peacefully in and around Jantar Mantar over exam paper leaks and a dire
Analysis
In a study published in PNAS Nexus on July 14, two researchers affiliated with institutes in France, Italy, and the UK analysed more than 4,400 launches in 16 geographical entities and with 330 rocket configurations to find that every time the cumulative payload sent to orbit has doubled since
Analysis
The physicist Carlo Rovelli makes a strong case in this essay that consciousness is “of the same nature” as everything else in the universe, but in the course of doing that, he often writes as if the alternatives to dualism — the view that the body and the mind are irreducibly
Analysis
From ‘Zero-deforestation commitments in Indonesia’s palm oil sector achieve high compliance but no additionality’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 13, 2026: … we evaluate the compliance and additionality of zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs) in the Indonesian palm oil sector, a major driver of tropical deforestation. We
Analysis
That thermodynamics has so very many applications is as fascinating as what it so often illuminates. Its tools and methods can be brought to bear on everything from celestial bodies and industrial machines to cellular biology and human endurance. The simple reason is that energy is the fundamental currency of
Life notes
Daily writing promptIs a little chaos actually good for us? View all responses I'm just going to invert that question a little and ask: Is a little order good for us? I'm doing this because the question "Is a little chaos good for us?"
Scicomm
As silly as it sounds, as a student of mechanical engineering, I am partial to technologies that make use of mechanical forces. Today they are harder to come by because the solutions to the problems they solved were replaced by electronic components from the mid-20th century on. Today, newer
Analysis
A new PNAS Nexus paper has shed light on a major source of hidden energy waste on the bitcoin network. Here, miners compete to solve a complex mathematical puzzle. The miner that solves a puzzle first is rewarded by the network with a block: new bitcoins plus transaction fees. An
Culture
Daily writing promptEmperor Palpatine has announced open elections for a new Emperor — and he’s nominated Darth Vader. You get to nominate one challenger. View all responses Even against his long career of deception, Sheev Palpatine announcing an open election for the seat of galactic emperor sounds particularly cynical. In