Twenty-six Fields Medalists sign a warning

The Fields Medal is the closest thing mathematics has to a Nobel Prize. It goes to at most four people every four years. Twenty-six of them signing the same document does not happen often.

The signatories do not claim the proof is wrong. Their objection is about what an open problem is for. A Millennium Prize Problem marks a question mathematicians do not yet understand. In their view, the value of solving one has always been the understanding people build along the way.

Terence Tao, who signed, pointed to the effect on how researchers behave. If a rumour is enough to set ten thousand agents on your problem, you stop telling people what you are working on.

I find this counterargument unusual because it is not about danger. It says nothing about extinction or cyberattacks. A profession says that getting answers handed to it costs something it needs.

Compare it with the paper on phages. The same kind of system that may help produce antibiotics that work also erodes the practice through which researchers learned to find such things.

It also falls outside the usual debate between alarm and hype. The harm the mathematicians describe does not come from an accident or from misuse. It comes from the technology doing what it was built to do.

I have not linked the text of the declaration or the list of signatories yet. What I write here rests on reporting about it.