Source Nature · Published · Open the original ↗
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AI has transformed maths, this is how we got here
The story of how maths came to run the world, and created the artificial-intelligence models that might surpass human mathematicians.
Big Math: The Hidden Codes That Run Our World Steven Strogatz & Alex Townsend Little, Brown and Company (2026)
When I was studying electrical engineering in India in the 1980s, a professor asked our class: “Why do short- and medium-wave radios produce a crackling sound, or static, when a scooter goes past, regardless of the station you are listening to?” None of us knew the answer.
The professor was using the question to introduce a mathematical operation called a Fourier transform. Each time the spark plug in a scooter engine fires, it produces a short pulse of electromagnetic radiation. The Fourier transform reveals that, mathematically, this signal is a summation of thousands of sine and cosine waves. Whatever frequency our radios are tuned to, the pulse produced by the spark plug contains some energy at that frequency, which we hear as static. It was a proverbial ‘aha’ moment for many of us in the class.
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