Mathematicians won't hand their riddles to machines, and one points to the MRI: 30 to 60 minutes of lying still, until compressed sensing let a scan be rebuilt from far fewer measurements. Faraday's magnets, Maxwell's sums, then radio: slow human work, the professor says, and the part machines skip.
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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Much Is Lost by Ceding Math's Hardest Problems to A.I.
The New York Times · Sep 29, 2026
