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Hendrik De Bie

@debiehendrik.bsky.social
1.1K followers 706 following 4K posts

Mathematician. Professor at UGent.

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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 1h
Ik ben aan het kijken voor een nieuw gascontract, en het prijs verschil tussen variabel en vast is echt zeer klein (rond de 10%). Dat verbaast me wel enigszins. Weet iemand meer?
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Ok, so I've been rereading a bit on the history of the famous Gelfand seminar. And wow does it have its toxic traits. But at the same time, it seems to be an educational form that is safe from AI, if it can be executed in a non-harmful way.
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John C. Baez @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The Nine Wise Mathematicians have handed down their recommendations for AI companies who want to prove big mathematical theorems. Their first recommendation is "Don't." It kinda weakens their point that they don't stop there. agmai.org/general-sep29/
At present, some frontier AI labs are testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models that remain inaccessible to the broader scientific community. Our recommendations are formulated with this practical context in mind. However, ideally, they would not do so. We want to state clearly from the start: we do not endorse this practice, and we ask them to stop testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models.

From: https://agmai.org/general-sep29/
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Gro-Tsen @gro-tsen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It used to be the case that if a mathematician A knew that a mathematician B was working on a problem P and A wanted to work on P as well, it was considered only polite to at least contact B and offer to work together, rather than trying to race to be the first to solve P. …
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ꭓle Ormsby 𓆙 @e-infinity.space · 29/09/2026
topology ∩ archaeology #MathSky
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Sridhar Ramesh @radishharmers.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Tech industry advancement was good when it was mostly about making better videogames. Using GPUs to torture mathematicians has been a dark turn.
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Happened several times to me
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Gastromathematics
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Imagine writing a short opinion piece like this and needing GPT6 to help you draft it. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/24/w...
terrytao.wordpress.com
We’re gonna need a lot more mathematicians
[This is a guest post by Amit Sahai. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] When I was an undergraduate student, I remember talking with…
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Daniel Bellingradt @dbellingradt.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I commented on this “partnership” already, and this is not good news. Keep commercially acting AI firms out of our cultural heritage.
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Mijn nicht (juriste) sloot een 4-pagina lang contract met haar kind van 4, dat het de groentjes flink moest opeten in ruil voor een speelgoedje, en ik vraag me nu af @uwdienstwillige.bsky.social @jelleflo.bsky.social of dit de opvoedingstips zijn die jullie in jullie lessen verstrekken.
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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
they're saying the AI can do math and science again, so it's time to reread Thurston's On Proof and Progress in Mathematics, a lovely articulation of the social work of assembling understanding, i.e., the best reason to tackle hard problems. www.ams.org/journals/bul...
When I started as a graduate student at Berkeley, I had trouble imagining
how I could "prove" a new and interesting mathematical theorem. I didn't
really understand what a "proof was.
By going to seminars, reading papers, and talking to other graduate students,
I gradually began to catch on. Within any field, there are certain theorems and
certain techniques that are generally known and generally accepted. When you
write a paper, you refer to these without proof. You look at other papers in the
field, and you see what facts they quote without proof, and what they cite in
their bibliography. You learn from other people some idea of the proofs. Then
you're free to quote the same theorem and cite the same citations. You don't
necessarily have to read the full papers or books that are in your bibliography.
Many of the things that are generally known are things for which there may be
no known written source. As long as people in the field are comfortable that
the idea works, it doesn't need to have a formal written source.At first I was highly suspicious of this process. I would doubt whether a certain idea was really established. But I found that I could ask people, and they
could produce explanations and proofs, or else refer me to other people or to
written sources that would give explanations and proofs. There were published
theorems that were generally known to be false, or where the proofs were generally known to be incomplete. Mathematical knowledge and understanding were
embedded in the minds and in the social fabric of the community of people
thinking about a particular topic. This knowledge was supported by written
documents, but the written documents were not really primary.
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Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 23/09/2026
NYU Courant professor Tristan Buckmaster, of Navier-Stokes drama fame, gave a talk at the new NYU Mathematics in the Age of AI seminar series. It was... popular.
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
UGent stelt de Vandenhove collectie tentoon. Ik denk gratis te bezichtigen. www.ugent.be/vandenhove/n...
ugent.be
Een thuis voor de Vandenhove-collectie: van architectenwoning tot tentoonstellingspaviljoen
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Yes, signed!
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Bart Penders @penders.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Back of the envelope calculations: 3600 years of research time went into the collective application process. The research will fund 3200 years of research. We are 400 research years poorer as a result of this. 1/2
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Ik zeg niet dat ik de piek van mijn carrière heb bereikt, maar een van de studentenclubs heeft net een lego minifigure van mij gemaakt dus ik denk dat we er wel zijn ongeveer.
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saulsch.bsky.social @saulsch.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I have been using a version of your request. Here it is (broken into pieces to fit): For the author(s): Please resubmit after adding a Tool Use Declaration and/or an AI Use Declaration and/or a Human Authorship Declaration.
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
My postdoc and former PhD student Sigiswald Barbier just put his new preprint online. arxiv.org/abs/2609.25159
arxiv.org
Monoidal Gröbner systems and categories of affine Brauer type
We introduce an analogue of Gröbner bases, or equivalently, Bergman's diamond lemma, for linear (super)monoidal categories. It gives a systematic way to study monoidal ideals and to prove basis theore...
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
#Mathsky I ended up last week contacting personally about 300 authors of 150 new arXiv submissions in math.CA and math.RT. About 1/3 of the papers already declared AI use for the math.
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Alexander Kasprzyk @amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Public perception about the future of mathematics is an enormous challenge facing our community. We are currently not even remotely in control of the narrative. For example, the photo shows what’s on display in every newsagents and supermarket in the UK. Will future students be scared away? #MathSky
The latest issue of New Scientist magazine, with the front cover “How AI blew up maths”.
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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Wow does the post title bury the lede! I particularly like the pictured comment.
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
"The whole system of rewards: top journals, top prizes, is dominated by this worldview. No wonder that at the top of mathematics, we find those who are now wondering loudly about the demise of mathematics, or even abandoning the subject themselves." Well said! proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/21/m...
proofsandprompts.com
Many choices lie ahead
Jonny Evans, Reader at the University of Lancaster I don’t use LLMS. I’m not going to say that you shouldn’t; it’s a choice. I don’t see the advent of LLMs as an exist…
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Bourbaki lezen is de basis van een brede opvoeding 🥲
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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 19/09/2026
"The proof [...] was obtained in a conversation with ChatGPT-6 Astra on Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 1:02 AM PDT. We then prepared this manuscript for public release, with the intent of uploading it on the morning of Thursday, September 17, 2026" Shameless, and shameful. arxiv.org/abs/2609.207...
arxiv.org
The Strong Secretary Conjecture is True for Linear Matroids
We prove a $1/e$ guarantee for the matroid secretary problem on linear matroids, therefore settling the strong secretary conjecture in this class of matroids. The result holds both when the matroid is...
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Maybe I called someone the Ed Sheeran of mathematics today.
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Bill Thurston "I think of mathematics as having a large component of psychology, because of its strong dependence on human minds. Dehumanized mathematics would be more like computer code, which is very different. Mathematical ideas, even simple ideas, are often hard to transplant from mind to mind.
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Ceryl @politicdormouse.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Marie-Louise Compernolle 1st #Flemish woman chemical engineer in #Belgium 1932 grad Uni of Ghent. Succeeded in getting assistant jobs, subjected to sexism from colleagues who didn't approve of women in workplace. 4 daughters all had STEM careers. b. #OTD 17 Sep 1909 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_L...
Marie-Louise Compernolle in B&W headshot 1920/30s. Hair in Princess Leia ear buns #WomenInSTEM #HistSTM #HistSTEM
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er die Mathematik in einen ungeheueren Haufen Lean-zertifizierten KI-Mülls verwandelt." - David Madore
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
This is unexpected (at least for me) but welcome support for mathematicians, by the French syndicate for taxi (and other) drivers. fo-inv.fr/communiques/...
fo-inv.fr
FO INV soutient les mathématiciens face aux pratiques extractives des entreprises d'IA
Le syndicat apporte son soutien aux mathématiciennes et mathématiciens confrontés à la captation de leur savoir-faire par les entreprises d'intelligence artificielle, et propose de partager les méthod...
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
An example of a very good AI disclosure statement.
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Société Mathématique de France @socmathfrance.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
[Prise de position du Bureau de la SMF sur les dernières annonces d'OpenAI] Le 8 septembre dernier, OpenAI a annoncé avoir résolu la question mathématique de la régularité des solutions de l'équation de Navier-Stokes, en exhibant un forçage permettant de construire une solution ⬇️
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I added the Representation Theory category as well (next to Classical Analysis). Contacted authors of some 50 papers today (a lot of work...). Gotten some thoughtful replies already.
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Gro-Tsen @gro-tsen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
An example of how the AI situation in math, combined with the rush to solve problems, is now completely out of hand: TWO different preprints have been uploaded to the arXiv, two days in a row (10 and 11 September) both showing that Medvedev logic is undecidable! 😂
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Emailed all (17) submissions in classical analysis today with the mail below. 8 papers already had a statement (1 of them that no AI was used). The AI statements I read were varying from rather imprecise tot very precise (1 of them).
Dear colleagues

I have seen that you have put a new preprint today on the classical analysis section of arxiv.
Congratulations on your new work!

I am sure you are aware of the tremendous, accelerating and complicated impact LLMs and AI have on our field (culminating so far in the news on Navier-Stokes last week).

For that reason, I plan to contact all authors in the classical analysis section (closest to my own mathematical niche) this week with the request to add an AI usage statement in their paper.
Such a statement could be:
-	No AI was used at all (e.g. see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.19207)
-	AI was only used for typesetting and language clean-up
-	AI was used in a research capacity (be explicit, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.03651 or https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.18024 for some examples)
-	Funding received from AI companies, or early access to new models should be disclosed as well. Also be explicit about precisely which models you have used.

I think it is crucial for our community of mathematicians to know how new results have been obtained, and I strongly believe such a statement will be beneficial for us all.

All the best
Hendrik
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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Everyone knows AI-written academic papers are embarrassing now, including their "authors", which is why even the publishers - who stand to benefit most from AI-amplified publication volumes - are now offering "Affordable human expert editing for AI-drafted or AI-edited manuscripts" 🤯
Screenshot of T&F editing services, reading:

Editing for AI-Assisted Manuscripts
NEW
Affordable human expert editing for AI-drafted or AI-edited manuscripts.

Starting at $0.031/ word
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Contemplating to email all arxiv submissions next week in my domain (i’ll pick classical analysis which is closest probably) asking the authors to disclose any AI use. Anybody up to do another category? #MathSky I plan to ask a similar question on every referee report I write.
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
"Mathematics only makes sense as a gift economy. It has no trade secrets; its understanding can’t be monetized." Thank you Michael Harris!
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
While it is good that they make this statement now, I feel that many high-ranking mathematicians have been making bed way to easily with AI companies, without any regard for their field or their colleagues in less prestigous positions.
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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Very forceful statement by Terry Tao about AI and math. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a... Note, he is not claiming the models aren't real and powerful. He's talking about how that power should be used. This, I believe, is what all AI discussions should center.
terrytao.wordpress.com
A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics
I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I've been saying it a few times already, but we cannot keep expecting PhD students and postdocs to give talks on preliminary results or work in progress, because they will get scooped by AI systems. It is effectively an end to open science communication as we were used to in mathematics.
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heidi goodson @goodsiephd.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I just want to do fun math with my friends, but I here to share an open letter about Mathathon, which is an AI and Math event being hosted at Caltech: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
docs.google.com
Open Letter about the Mathathon
The full text of the open letter is below. By signing this open letter, you consent to your name, title, and institutional affiliation being publicly displayed beneath this open letter. You can access...
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Dr. Marissa Kawehi Loving @marissakawehi.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Wise words from Matilde Marcolli. “What comes out of [AI] may be good or evil, useful or not, dangerous or tame, but there is one thing it will not be: the thing that lives right now inside your mind and that is asking to be expressed, the thing that only you can give a voice to.”
its.caltech.edu
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Gro-Tsen @gro-tsen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
So it's getting clear that some of the math abilities AI models have become ❝superhuman❞ at is “not giving credit where credit is due”, like “failing to cite previous work on the subject that inspired you” and, worse, “stealing colleagues' ideas”. 🧵⤵️
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Alexander Kasprzyk @amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Goodness. I've know Sasha Borisov since my PhD days and have a deep respect for his work. To hear that it's been used by the all-consuming #LLM machine in this way without credit upsets me a lot. #MathSky I presume this is the relevant arXiv paper? arxiv.org/abs/2609.05746
arxiv.org
On endomorphisms of affine spaces and the Jacobian problem
Let $p$ be a prime. We provide examples which show that étale endomorphisms of affine planes over an algebraically closed field $k$ of characteristic $p$ can have fibers of arbitrary finite cardinal. ...
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Louigi Addario-Berry @louigi.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
I'm proud to announce the creation of the Association for Human Mathematics. We aim to protect mathematics as a human endeavour against the threat of AI and to maintain the independence of the mathematical community from corporate interests. www.ahmath.org
ahmath.org
AHM
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Hendrik De Bie @debiehendrik.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I have proudly joined the Association For Human Mathematics (AHM) www.ahmath.org
ahmath.org
AHM
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Rowena Ball @rowena-mathscieng.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
The old answer to that old question was that mathematics is the part of physics where the experiments are cheap. So mathematics used to be good value. Now we hear that a mathematics experiment costs 22 million dollars. Ha! Maybe the roles are now reversed!
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🇵🇸Tim Henke (tɪm 'ɦɛŋ.kə) @timhenke.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
We should talk more about what a travesty the bibliography of OpenAI is 16 measly citations for a 165-page paper, of which 5 are just the problem statement. Only 7 are from this century. They failed to cite the method they used. And the guy whom they offered single-authorship & the Millennium Prize
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