Twenty-five winners of the Fields Medal have issued a joint statement warning that the AI industry’s race to solve famous mathematics problems can conflict with the discipline’s goal of building understanding. Signatories include Terence Tao, Peter Scholze, Maryna Viazovska, Martin Hairer and Cédric Villani.
Their concern is not simply that machines can produce answers. Important open problems act as landmarks that prompt new concepts, lectures, discussion, simplification and connections with earlier work. A rapidly announced machine-generated solution may arrive without a proper write-up, clear attribution or enough time for mathematicians to isolate and absorb its useful ideas. The statement says flooding the field with results could damage the intellectual environment that makes those results meaningful.
The group connects that risk to education and other creative or scientific professions, where training develops judgment and the ability to ask new questions rather than merely producing a final artifact. They do not call for banning AI and acknowledge that it could accelerate genuine study. Instead, they argue that researchers, companies and society must decide how the tools are introduced, credited and evaluated. The statement is an expert policy position, not evidence that mathematical knowledge has already declined.