What Timothy Gowers thinks about LLMs
British mathematician; Fields Medal 1998. Professor at the Collège de France and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Started the Polymath collaborative-proof projects and the 2012 Cost of Knowledge boycott of Elsevier. Writes Gowers's Weblog.
Timothy Gowers did not write this page.
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2 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Timothy Gowers has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsit still doesn't seem to be the case that LLMs are better than all humans at all aspects of mathematics.
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Their wordsVery roughly, LLMs would have the edge when there is more of a probabilistic element to the proof-finding process: they would be good at problems for which the best method is to try a lot of ideas, not necessarily particularly novel, until at some point you get lucky.