Gowers's Weblog

12 Aug 2026

For the sake of anyone who might read this blog post in the distant future (a month from now, say), let me mention that I am writing it a few days after OpenAI announced that it had solved ten major

26 Jul 2026

Last September I went to a workshop at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden to discuss mathematics and AI with historians, philosophers, computer scientists, AI researchers, and mathematicians of several

8 May 2026

We are all having to keep revising upwards our assessments of the mathematical capabilities of large language models. I have just made a fairly large revision as a result of ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, to which

20 Mar 2026

An Artin-Tits group is a group with a finite set of generators in which every relation is of the form or for some positive integer , where and are two of the generators. In particular, the

22 Sep 2025

It’s been over three years since my last post on this blog and I have sometimes been asked, understandably, whether the project I announced in my previous post was actually happening. The answer is

28 Apr 2022

I am very happy to say that I have recently received a generous grant from the Astera Institute to set up a small group to work on automatic theorem proving, in the first instance for about three

30 Jan 2021

Four years ago I wrote a post about an awful plan by Leicester University to sack its entire mathematics department, invite them to reapply for their jobs, and rehire all but six “lowest

20 May 2020

From time to time academic journals undergo an interesting process of fission. Typically as a result of some serious dissatisfaction, the editorial board resigns en masse to set up a new journal, the

28 Mar 2020

The adaptive-triggering policy. On page 12 of a document put out by Imperial College London, which has been very widely read and commented on, and which has had a significant influence on UK policy

30 Oct 2019

It’s taken longer than we originally intended, but I am very happy to report that Advances in Combinatorics, a new arXiv overlay journal that is run along similar lines to Discrete Analysis, has

19 Jun 2019

I have just received an email from Sergey Kitaev, one of the three combinatorialists at Strathclyde. As in many universities, they belong not to the mathematics department but to the computer science

21 May 2019

This post is addressed at anyone who is voting in Great Britain in the forthcoming elections to the European Parliament and whose principal aim is to maximize the number of MEPs from

22 Dec 2018

A couple of months ago, I can’t remember precisely how, I became aware of a book called How I Wish I’d Taught Maths, by Craig Barton, that seemed to be highly thought of. The basic idea was that

9 Dec 2018

The following story arrived in my email inbox (and those of many others) this morning. Apparently a paper was submitted to the Taylor and Francis journal Dynamical Systems, and was accepted. The

16 Nov 2018

One should of course be concerned when anybody is detained for spurious reasons, but when that person is a noted mathematician, the shock is greater. Six academics have recently been detained in

10 Nov 2018

This is a bit of a niche post, since its target audience is people who are familiar with quasirandom graphs and like proofs of an analytic flavour. Very roughly, a quasirandom graph is one that

12 Sep 2018

First, I’d like to thank the large number of commenters on my previous post for keeping the discussion surprisingly calm and respectful given the topic discussed. In that spirit, and to try to

9 Sep 2018

Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the

4 Jun 2018

This post is to announce that a new journal, Advances in Combinatorics, has just opened for submissions. I shall also say a little about the journal, about other new journals, about my own

19 Sep 2017

It has been in the news recently — or rather, the small corner of the news that is of particular interest to mathematicians — that Maryanthe Malliaris and Saharon Shelah recently had an

12 Aug 2017

While Polymath13 has (barring a mistake that we have not noticed) led to an interesting and clearly publishable result, there are some obvious follow-up questions that we would be wrong not to try to

27 Jul 2017

There is widespread (even if not universal) agreement that something is deeply wrong with the current system of academic publishing. The basic point, which has been made innumerable times by

25 Jul 2017

I have now completed a draft of a write-up of a proof of the following statement. Recall that a random -sided die (in the balanced-sequences model) is a sequence of length of integers between 1 and

30 May 2017

It has become clear that what we need in order to finish off one of the problems about intransitive dice is a suitable version of the local central limit theorem. Roughly speaking, we need a version

27 May 2017

I hope, but am not yet sure, that this post is a counterexample to Betteridge’s law of headlines. To back up that hope, let me sketch an argument that has arisen from the discussion so far, which