Field Medalist Yu Deng jokes about quitting math for fiction as 25 winners warn AI is damaging the field
25 winners of mathematics' highest honor, among them a medalist who joked he would quit the field for romance fiction, warned that AI companies are damaging their discipline.
Yu Deng, a 37-year-old University of Chicago professor who received the 2026 Fields Medal in July, expressed on Chinese social media on September 11 a hypothetical scenario: if artificial intelligence could solve all mathematical problems, he would quit his academic career and write a "yuri novel," referring to a genre of Japanese fiction depicting romantic relationships between women.
The next day, he clarified to the South China Morning Post that the statement was a joke and did not believe AI would ever reach that level, at least not for the specific problems he was concerned about. The joint statement signed by 25 Fields medalists, including renowned mathematicians Terence Tao and Peter Scholze, was titled "Serious Misalignment of AI in Mathematics."
The authors argued that the pursuit of problem-solving is merely a proxy for conceptual understanding in mathematics, not the ultimate goal of the discipline. The signatories expressed concerns that AI companies, focused on problem-solving as a benchmark of model capability, are producing results too quickly for mathematicians to verify.
The signatories also raised disputes over attribution and the loss of knowledge passed down through generations of researchers.
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