Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the future of mathematics

[This is a guest post by Steven Strogatz. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.]

WIRED reported today that I began to cry while talking about AI and mathematics. But the article didn’t explain what moved me.

The truth is, I’m not entirely sure myself.

(A disclosure upfront: ChatGPT helped me write this post. I’m tweaking it a little to sound more like myself.)

First, thanks to WIRED reporter Isabella Ward. She had the difficult job of distilling a long, wide-ranging conversation into a timely piece about the amazing events of the past week. And she had to put it together in one day! A lot inevitably got left out.

OK, so why did I get choked up? It wasn’t about AI taking my job. I’m 67 and nearing retirement. I also love playing around with AI and find it exhilarating. I use it in research, brainstorming, and learning—and, as you can see, to put this post together.

So what was it then? I think it was when I tried to convey the magnificent 4,000-year story of our subject to the reporter. Mathematics, I said, is more than its results. It’s a human way of seeing and understanding, a conversation in which one generation explains to the next not only what is true, but why. The pleasure of that understanding, and the new discoveries it makes possible, are part of what mathematics is for.

It’s an honor to be part of that long conversation—all the beautiful and important work, and the benefits that have accrued to humanity.

Then, suddenly, the tidal wave of AI hits math in 2026.

Something about the grandeur of the tradition and the suddenness of the change may have conspired to get me worked up.

But I’m not sure it was that. It might have been when I started riffing about Tristan Buckmaster. I don’t know him, but from what I’ve read over this unsettling past week, he reminds me of many mathematicians I’ve known: pure, clear, and scrupulous, committed to truth, and perhaps unprepared for the corporate world.

During the WIRED interview, I mentioned Wimbledon four times as an analogy. To me, Buckmaster represents the Wimbledon of mathematics: white clothes, tradition, etiquette, and the ideal of being a gentle person. How you play the game matters.

The U.S. Open is different: louder, brasher, full of individual style, crassness, energy, and orientation toward the future. It’s also more open and democratic than Wimbledon. I get what’s appealing about that.

With the men’s final coming tomorrow, I find myself wondering whether AI could make mathematics at the cutting edge more like the U.S. Open than Wimbledon. It could open the gates, allowing millions of people without years of specialized training to pour in and make discoveries.

That’s thrilling. And I don’t want to be the stodgy old guard. So yes, I love the U.S. Open … and I also love Wimbledon. (I went for the first time a few years ago, and got choked up then too!)

For the past two years, Alex Townsend and I have been writing a book that traces the marvelous ideas that brought humanity to this dizzying moment: the power unleashed by supercharging math with computers, the gifts it has given us, and what may be yet to come.

So all of that, I think, may have been what set me off: the grandeur of a 4,000-year human tradition, the inconceivability of what may lie ahead—and the possibility that something precious may disappear along the way.