Terence Tao: “Today there are a lot of very tedious types of mathematics that we don’t like doing, so we look for clever ways to get around them. But AIs will just happily blast through those tedious computations. When we integrate AI with human workflows, we can just glide over these obstacles. I also think mathematicians will start doing math at larger scales. Think about the difference between case studies and population surveys in sciences. If you were to study a disease in the 18th century, if it was a rare disease, you might study one patient who has this disease and record all their symptoms and take meticulous notes. But in the 21st century, you can do a clinical trial and you can administer a drug to 1,000 people and do statistics and get much more precise information about the efficiency of your drug. Mathematics is still very much at the case-study level. A paper will take one or two problems and study them to death in a very handcrafted, intensive way. That’s our style. But what AI tools enable is population studies.”
WSJ: “If the traditional 40-hour schedule gets in the way of your productivity, focus or well-being, it’s time to rethink your workweek. That isn’t feasible for everyone, of course. But a lot of us have jobs where a different work structure makes more sense. Perhaps you’re in a job that would benefit from longer, uninterrupted work periods. Or you focus better when you work early in the day, or late at night. Or you work with people in other countries or time zones, and need to be available during their business day. I’ve worked remotely for more than two decades, and over that time, I’ve experimented with many different ways to structure my schedule. Here are four that have been effective for me, and that could inspire experiments of your own.” ” The suggestions: meeting-free Mondays, the reverse workday, the split workday, and the project sprint.
FT: “Across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, hundreds of international offshoots and collaborations have been established by Chinese universities in the past decade. These outposts are capitalising on the rising prestige of China’s universities, which have undergone a three-decade-long transformation in both scale and quality. In 2010, only one mainland Chinese institution ranked in the top 50 of the QS World University Rankings, a closely watched global league table. By 2025, that number had risen to five, and they were positioned higher up the table. “Chinese universities’ climbing in global rankings is real. It’s not a ‘mystery bounce’ but the result of three decades of sustained, targeted investment,” says Denis Simon, an American academic.”
Greg Ip: “Technology enables us to produce more or better products with less hours of work. Over time, this makes us richer. It’s why we produce many times more food with far fewer farmers than 150 years ago and our factories crank out more products with a smaller workforce than in 1979. Technological advancements always cost some people their jobs—those whose skills can be easily substituted by tech. But their loss is more than offset through three other channels. The new technology enhances the skills of some survivors, who become more productive and better paid; it helps create new businesses and new jobs; and it makes some stuff cheaper, increasing consumers’ incomes, adjusted for inflation, which can be spent on other stuff, generating yet more jobs. These offsets explain why, through the sweep of U.S. history, technological advance hasn’t, by itself, raised unemployment for the country as a whole.”
