I have great respect for Terry Tao but let's not forget that while he won the Fields Medal at a relatively young age, he hasn't made any major contribution to math comparable to proving Fermat's Last Theorem (Andrew Wiles did), solving the Poincaré's Conjecture (Grigori Perelman did) or Yitang Zhang's proof progress towards solving the twin prime conjecture.
Perhaps for mathematicians like Terry Tao AI will be a tool they will rely on, but for mathematicians like the aforementioned, a pen, paper and the published research literature will continue to be their main tools!
Think about it. While the national labs use these systems to model serious stuff -such as climate or nuclear weapons- Meta uses them to train LLMs. What a joke, honestly!
In my view, the lesson of Lynn's life and contributions is twofold:
- California continues to be a necessary place for America and the world. By this I mean not just the geography, but a place that welcomes people from all walks of life seeking new beginnings.
- Never give up. Seriously. She was in her late 30s, early 40s -an age many would have considered "old" in the 1970s- when she made the breakthrough that made her famous.
I stopped counting the number of times I have watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp4t_5v_y_0 that features him prominently as the scientific director of the Voyager missions.
I can't remember well but I was either in my second or third year of college when I saw this documentary for the first time.