An interview with Sir Timothy Gowers

Sir Timothy Gowers, Professeur titulaire of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France and Fields Medal recipient, is one of the world’s foremost mathematicians.

As part of the G-Research Distinguished Speaker Series, Sir Timothy was one of three speakers at the 2022 Computer Guided Mathematics Symposium.

Before taking to the stage, we spoke to Sir Timothy about his love of mathematics, his focus on Combinatorics, and his current work on the process by which human beings solve mathematics problems.

The long-term goal for Sir Timothy’s current work is to enable computers to replicate what mathematicians do, something he discussed in-depth during his talk, and the subsequent panel discussion, with Alex Davies (DeepMind) and Kevin Buzzard (Imperial College).

What is mathematics?

Sir Timothy’s talk at the Computer Guided Mathematics Symposium focused on Automatic Theorem Proving.

“I think the take home my message from my talk…would be that things are going to change quite a lot, as a result of efforts put in to automatic theorem proving,” said Sir Timothy.

“In the extreme, it might go as far as putting us [mathematicians] out of business, because computers can just do it better than we can.”

G-Research Distinguished Speaker Series

Throughout the year, we host a number of speakers as part of G-Research’s Distinguished Speaker Series.

We pride ourselves on our learning environment, which gives people the opportunity to develop personally and professionally within their roles, and our Distinguished Speaker Series is central to that.

We invite global experts in their fields to discuss their cutting-edge work with an audience of G-Research employees and guests, giving attendees the chance to learn from the best.

Interested in joining future Distinguished Speaker Series events? Sign-up now

Want to watch the talks, panel discussion and interviews from our Computer Guided Mathematics Symposium? Watch here