2026-03-21
1 小时 23 分钟Okay, today I'm chatting with Terence Tao, who needs an introduction.
Terence, I want to begin by having you retell the story of how Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion,
because I think this will be a great jumping off point to talk about AI for math.
Okay, yeah.
So I've always had an amateur interest in astronomy,
and so I've loved stories of how the early astronomers worked out the nature of the universe.
So Kepler was building on the work of Copernicus, who was himself. building on the work of Aristarchus.
So Copernicus very famously proposed the heliocentric model, that instead of the planets
and the sun going around the Earth,
that the sun was at the center of the solar system and the other planets were going around the sun.
And Copernicus proposed that the orbits of the planets were perfect circles.
And his theory kind of fit the observations that the Greeks
and the Arabs and the Indians had worked out over centuries.
I think Kepler got interested, like he learned about these theories in his studies,
and he made this observation that the ratios of the size of the orbits
that Kerenko predicted seem to have some geometric meaning.
I think he started proposing that, you know,
if you take, say, the orbit of, say, the Earth
and you enclose it in, I think, maybe a cube, the outer sphere
that encloses the cube almost match perfectly the orbit of Mars and so forth.