# Terence Tao

Terence Tao — UCLA professor, Fields Medal (2006) — is one of the most widely followed working mathematicians, partly through his long-running WordPress blog. Over the past year that blog has become one of the more credible first-hand sources on what LLMs can and can't do for mathematics, because Tao writes up specifics rather than impressions: which parts the model got right, which bugs it introduced, where he decided the risk was acceptable.

His public stance is scoped rather than boosterish. He has written about LLMs for formally-verified math and for generating ideas on research problems, and separately about lower-stakes uses like teaching tools and paper supplements. In each case he draws a line around where he trusts the output. That makes him a useful counterweight to both the "AI does math now" hype and the flat "stochastic parrot" dismissal — his reports tend to survive contact with the details because he supplies them.

Alongside [[gowers-blog]] (Tim Gowers), Tao is one of the two Fields medalists whose LLM write-ups anchor the wiki's [[llm-mathematical-research]] discussion. The two complement each other: Gowers documents a model contributing an original research idea, Tao documents the more mundane but broader case of coding agents doing the tooling and exposition work around the math.

## Ingested articles

- [[tao-apps-coding-agents]] — July 2026, porting his 1999 Java math applets to JavaScript and vibe-coding new visualizations, with a careful accounting of where the bugs are tolerable