Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, believes AI could usher in an era of “Big Mathematics,” where humans and machines work together on complex problems.In the mid-noughties, when music by the Killers and Franz Ferdinand blared out of every pub and nightclub I passed, I spent my days and nights struggling through a Ph.D. in applied mathematics. My research focused on simulating how special light waves interact in liquid crystals and using simple equations to approximate and ...