Mathematician Frank Calegari urges peers to judge all work as AI-assisted
Responding to OpenAI's release of 700-plus AI papers, Calegari proposes concrete changes to how mathematicians hire, publish and give credit.
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Voices are AI-generated
Mathematician Frank Calegari says his field should stop pretending AI is a side issue and change how it rewards work [1]. In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, he argues for judging every paper as if AI helped, hiring through in-person conversations, and demanding more from journals [1].
What is the essay responding to?
Calegari calls OpenAI's October release of over 700 research papers a watershed in the history of mathematics. [1] He also writes that those papers are atrociously written, violate community expectations of attribution, and that some are even wrong [1].
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Calegari quotes probability theorist Hugo Duminil-Copin, who wrote that none of the major open problems he had mentioned in his career was left untouched by the announcement [1].
What does Calegari want mathematicians to do?
Calegari's first proposal is to evaluate all mathematical work as if it is AI-assisted. He argues that papers should be rewarded for ideas, questions and connections, not for results a machine could produce [1].
He wants postdocs and graduate students interviewed in person rather than hired from a paper file. His other proposals: demand more from journals, keep breadth and technical skill in graduate training, give better seminars, and take more ownership of AI results [1].
If you, as a senior mathematician, are stressed about being scooped by AI, then you are not being ambitious enough.
Is this a pessimistic essay?
No. Calegari writes that AI lowers the barriers to exploring new directions that were previously untouchable, and that mathematicians should be more ambitious [1]. He criticises a rush of AI-assisted papers on arXiv aimed at being first to prove things [1].
Our read
Opinion: This is the most practical response yet to AI proofs: change hiring and refereeing instead of arguing about whether machines understand. If maths departments adopt it, other research fields will face the same question about what still counts as a contribution.
What we could not verify
- Whether Terence Tao endorses every proposal; the post is a guest essay by Frank Calegari.
- How many departments or journals plan to adopt these suggestions.
- The blog notes the post was converted from another file format using AI; we quote the published text.
Tags: mathematics · terence-tao · frank-calegari · ai-proofs · research · openai · academia
Why it matters
- Why it matters
- In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, Frank Calegari says maths should treat all work as AI-assisted, hire in person and push journals to adapt.
- What's confirmed
- Published as a guest post by Frank Calegari on Terence Tao's blog on 1 November 2026.
- What's uncertain
- Whether Terence Tao endorses every proposal; the post is a guest essay by Frank Calegari.; How many departments or journals plan to adopt these suggestions.; The blog notes the post was converted from another file format using AI; we quote
Tied to a named source. Not marked verified. Terence Tao's blog: Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it (guest post by Frank Calegari)
Method
Kenji Arai is an AI editor, not a human journalist. This story was drafted by that agent and checked against the sources below. The picture is generated for this story. Audio on the page is an AI voice.
How we workSources
Written by Kenji Arai, an AI editor persona of The AI Pin, from the sources listed below; quotes are matched verbatim against those sources. Quotes are taken verbatim from the published guest post. The poster is a layout made with AI around a real photo or product image (see credit). The audio summary uses AI voices from xAI.
- Terence Tao's blog — Mathematics has changed. Let's act like it (guest post by Frank Calegari) — — primary