Mathematics as gift economy
- Termin in der Vergangenheit
- Dienstag, 13. Oktober 2026, 20:00 Uhr
- Hörsaal Mathematikon (INF 205)
- Prof. Dr. Michael Harris, Columbia University / USA
Although Lewis Hyde's The Gift is primarily concerned with the status of works of art, he does devote part of a chapter to arguing that scientific research functions as a gift economy: the scientist (ideally) contributes new knowledge as a shared resource for the community, which in turn is built on this sharing. Hyde doesn't specifically refer to mathematics, whose community in many ways exemplifies this ideal. Framed in this way, the crucial distinction is not between human and machine mathematics, but rather between human and corporate mathematics, and this latter distinction is responsible for the "severe misalignment," identified in a letter signed by 25 Fields medalists, between the announcements of the AI industry and the practice of human mathematics. I will explore what it means to view the former as a gift economy, and ask how AI-generated mathematics can be integrated into the gift economy under conditions of what Terence Tao has called "proof abundance."
Adresse
Hörsaal Mathematikon
Im Neuenheimer Feld 205
69120 HeidelbergVeranstaltungstyp
Vortrag
About the speaker
Michael Harris was born and grew up in the Kingsessing neighborhood of Philadelphia. He obtained his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his Ph.D. at Harvard, where he wrote his thesis under the direction of Barry Mazur. Harris successively held professorships at Brandeis University; at Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot, where he is now an emeritus professor; and since 2013 at Columbia University. He shared the Clay Research Award with Richard Taylor and received the Grand Prix Sophie Germain de l’Académie des Sciences, both in 2007. His work in number theory has focused on the interplay between the Langlands program and Grothendieck's theory of motives. He is a member of Academia Europea, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is one of the authors of the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics, and maintains a Substack newsletter, Silicon Reckoner, devoted to “what computers will do for, or to, mathematics.”