During today's #ICM2026 opening ceremonies, the IMU announced the 2026 Fields Medals recipients:
@UChicago's Yu Deng, @stonybrooku's John Pardon, @UofT's Jacob Tsimerman, and Hong Wang of @nyuniversity and @Institut_IHES.
Read more: https://t.co/oJARAI8I8j
There is an undergrad at the @UChicago who often asks me for advice on his thesis. Of course, I give him comments in each instance. I always want to support someone using science to change the world.
I just finished a new paper that is in his area of interest and I sent it to him, ending my email with, “would love to hear your thoughts on this study.”
Within 5 minutes I had a response: “Professor List, I would love to provide comments but I will need $50 per hour for my time. Since the paper has a lot of detailed math, it will take me approximately 10 hours. I take Zelle or Venmo.”
How would you respond?
A Fields Medalist is reverse-engineering an 87-year-old math problem with ChatGPT.
Terence Tao just publicly shared his entire conversation trying to understand the new Jacobian conjecture counterexample.
The way he probes structure, looks for symmetries, and refuses to accept miraculous cancellation is peak Tao.
Watching one of the greatest living mathematicians think out loud with an AI is honestly beautiful.
It’s rare to see a mind like his work in real time.
- https://t.co/0FWvpAadyc
The session is pure gold you can literally watch how a top mathematician thinks.
Stanford professor just released the lecture that explains the math behind every reinforcement learning system.
83 minutes. Free. From Stanford.
Before agents learn to trade, optimize, or make decisions, they all start with the same problem:
How do you choose the best action when the future is uncertain?
This lecture breaks down the foundation:
• turning environments into Markov Decision Processes
• policy evaluation and why value functions matter
• Q-value recurrence equations behind modern RL
• value iteration and convergence limits
Every RL algorithm built today is just a variation of these ideas.
The math has been public for decades.
The hard part was never knowing the Bellman equation.
The hard part is knowing when your model actually understands the environment and when it is just fitting noise.
Bookmark this before it gets buried in your feed.
Updated 2204-page PDF Mathematics ebook:
"Algebra, Topology, Differential Calculus, and Optimization Theory For Computer Science and Machine Learning"
Find it here: https://t.co/HZc0LRoD7R
"Algebra, Topology, Differential Calculus, and Optimization Theory for Computer Science and Machine Learning" is an excellent free university-level textbook on the mathematical foundations of computer science and machine learning.
Across more than 1,000 pages, it covers groups, rings, fields, vector spaces, bases, linear maps, matrices, direct sums, determinants, Gaussian elimination, LU and Cholesky decomposition, echelon forms, iterative methods for solving linear systems, differential calculus, topology, convexity, optimization, and many other topics.
It is a rigorous, broad, and modern reference with a clear focus on the mathematics behind AI, machine learning, and computer science.
https://t.co/ykCMrlmGCg