I have spent a week at the Tianyuan Mathematics Research Center (TYMC), near Kunming, Yunnan Province, China, attending a very enjoyable workshop on random matrix theory and its applications. This is one of the most impressive mathematical research facilities I have ever visited — a Chinese Oberwolfach. It opened only three years ago and lies in the heart of a forest.
This workshop was organized by the RMTA China research network, that also runs an online seminar. My link with China/RMTA goes back to a summer school in Changchun (2011), and to a workshop in Hong Kong (2015). It is also an opportunity to remember our colleague Wenbo Li (1963–2013), who participated in the Changchun summer school, and who left us far too soon.
During this workshop, it was obvious that 2026 is the year of mathematics at the age of AI. Many mathematicians are now using AI, for all aspects of their work, and it works better than ever. However, and especially for early- and mid-career mathematicians, this can be truly destabilizing and depressing. Nevertheless, our mathematical social system was already reaching absurdity, and thanks to the AI revolution, we are now forced to reinvent it. I like the idea that AI leads us to spend a larger proportion of time digesting mathematics, while keeping creativity in the way we question and imagine theorems. This is very much in the spirit of what I am used to doing, combining blog posts, research articles, and lecture notes. We may wonder if we can still list open problems in our talks and articles. In my view, the answer is positive, and we could keep open questions for ourselves and cook up public open questions for sharing with the others. Given the efficiency of today AI for simultaneous translation of handwritten and spoken mathematics, I wonder what will be the effect in the near future for universities and foreign students. Curiously and personally, I have realized that 2026 marks the midpoint of my life between the 20th and 21st centuries.
Back to Changchun and AI: the RMTA summer school, which can be seen as a pure mathematical event, was organized by Northeast Normal University in Changchun. It turns out that Changchun is well known for its Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, which works on extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), a key technology for the production of advanced semiconductor chips, including GPUs. We can expect that in the near future China will become a serious competitor to the Western semiconductor companies ASML (Europe) and TSMC (Taiwan).
Back to Hong Kong and AI: the RMTA workshop, which was a pure mathematical even, was organized by the Hong Kong University. It turns out that Hong Kong is very close to Shenzhen, the Chinese San Francisco or silicon valley, with already a strong production for AI models and notably open weights AI models. Can we expect in the near future Chinese open weights models as efficient for research in mathematics than OpenAI ChatGPT? This is unclear for the moment, according to Chinese colleagues who tried to convince Chinese corporate to invest this idea.
Further reading.
- Terence Tao
Mathematics in the age of AI
Proceedings of the ICM 2026 - Djalil Chafaï
An optimal Poincaré inequality for the complex Ginibre log-gas
Personal and modest example of mathematics at the age of AI