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AI has transformed maths — this is how we got here
Anil Ananthaswamy is the author of Why Machines Learn (2024).
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Artificial-intelligence tools have found solutions to several mathematics and physics problems that had been unresolved for years. Credit: Barbara Sax/AFP/Getty
Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World Steven Strogatz & Alex Townsend Little, Brown and Company (2026)
When I was studying electrical engineering in India in the 1980s, a professor asked our class: “Why do short- and medium-wave radios produce a crackling sound, or static, when a scooter goes past, regardless of the station you are listening to?” None of us knew the answer.
The professor was using the question to introduce a mathematical operation called a Fourier transform. Each time the spark plug in a scooter engine fires, it produces a short pulse of electromagnetic radiation. The Fourier transform reveals that, mathematically, this signal is a summation of thousands of sine and cosine waves. Whatever frequency our radios are tuned to, the pulse produced by the spark plug contains some energy at that frequency, which we hear as static. It was a proverbial ‘aha’ moment for many of us in the class.
Big Math by mathematicians Steven Strogatz and Alex Townsend contains many such aha moments. But the book is so much more. Strogatz and Townsend use the assuredness of mathematicians and the skill of storytellers to paint a vivid portrait of the variety of ways in which mathematics underpins almost every aspect of people’s lives.
The authors start with an inspiring story about Regina Barzilay, a computer scientist who had breast cancer and, after she finished her treatment in 2014, decided to do something about the lack of tools for spotting the early warning signs of the disease. The technology that she needed to achieve her goal already existed — machine learning — but it was mostly being used to recommend films to people and steer online buying behaviour, and was not reaching many of the people who would benefit from its use in health care. Barzilay collaborated with radiologists and computer scientists to develop a machine-learning model that could predict a person’s risk of developing breast cancer within the next five years from a single mammogram.
The breakthrough proof bringing mathematics closer to a grand unified theor
In the book, this story is a set-up for talking about the ubiquitousness of what the authors call ‘big math’ — the mathematics behind technologies that are “shaking the foundations of how we work, how we play, how we learn, how we shop and travel and communicate, even how we heal”.