The Fields Medalist Terence Tao is on the front lines of a debate about artificial intelligence and the future of his field. Terence Tao is typically described as one of the world’s greatest living mathematicians, but right now he is doing very little math. “I’m on a war footing,” he said while grabbing coffee during a two-day math workshop at the University of California, Los Angeles, that was rife with talk about the existential crisis that artificial intelligence has created in his field. Days earlier OpenAI had announced that it had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven “Millennium Prize...