2026-09-11
22 分钟The Economist.
Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.
I'm Jason Palmer.
Today on the show, a hard look at the counter-terrorism machinery passed after 9/11
and a tribute to a champion of Chinese traditional opera.
First up, though,
We talked yesterday about how artificial intelligence was, on balance, creating jobs,
a pattern you see whenever transformative tech breaks onto the scene.
Today, we want to look at a transformation in the heady world of higher mathematics.
OpenAI says it's cracked something called the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem.
It's one of the millennium prize problems, seven devilishly difficult mathematical mysteries first listed in 2000.
The prize for cracking one is a million dollars.
Look, AI is better than humans at lots of stuff, and it should come as no surprise
that it can power through equations and theorems that have stumped humans for decades.
But here's the thing about mathematics at this level, it's not just about the solution,
it's very much about how you, or it, got there.
One thing we can say for sure is that something significant has happened,
but the way in which this becomes significant, I think, is very much dependent on who you ask.
Sam Wikeley is a science correspondent for The Economist.
This really should be an amazing moment for mathematics.