Quest for the Missing Pixels

Why not hand the hard math problems to AI? One mathematician's answer is the MRI: a scan takes 30 to 60 minutes, and compressed sensing, the idea that nearby parts of an image look alike so far fewer measurements can rebuild it, came from decades of humans asking why. Faraday's magnets, Maxwell's equations, then radio. He says machines skip the why.

An MRI scan takes 30 to 60 minutes and children who cannot keep still are often sedated; a mathematical idea, compressed sensing, lets a scan be rebuilt from a surprisingly small number of measurements because neighbouring parts of the image resemble one another. A Cornell mathematician argues that such breakthroughs come from the slow back-and-forth between equations and real problems, from Faraday's magnets to Maxwell's equations to the cellphone, and that handing mathematics to AI could cost the next one.

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