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3. How do we change systematic incentives to reward pro-social work (reviewing, teaching, exposition, community building)?

What I'm trying to understand better (and maybe you can help me here?) is: 1. How can we do a better job of creating community in our universities? and 2. The old system has one thing going for it: It produces (some) people who are excellent mathematicians. How do we retain this?

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2. The Tuākana/Tēina (older sibling/younger sibling) idea pairs the more knowledgeable with the less experienced person so they can learn from each other. 3. The concept of Te Whāre Tapawhā teaches us that the wellbeing of our students is strongly dependent on many interconnected aspects.

I arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand a few years ago and have since learned a bit about the indigenous (Ao Māori) way of teaching and learning. Community and reciprocity is all over the place there: 1. The word "Ako" means both teaching and learning, and for good reason!

But while we have always been providing this, maybe we have not done a great job at a) advertising this, and b) making these parts a more integral part of the university experience. In other words, we need to put the one thing front and center that we have (and GenAI does not): Community

I believe universities still have a major selling point: If you want, you can talk about fantastically cool subjects with people who are experts in the field. And this is so fun! Also you get to make new friends, and build career networks, and learn from others, as well as teach others.

At UC, we see attendance rates dropping even more than previously. A colleague of mine showed up to a classroom with 0 students attending, which has not happened ever before (according to my recollection). Are we still providing the right value proposition to our students?

The way we run maths courses has a hard time competing with that: We're often not really providing a lot more than (due to our human imperfection, and the reality of needing to teach a group of students rather than tutoring individuals) a slightly less targeted explanation of maths than ChatGPT.

Again, this has changed due to GenAI. I can get a tutorial on simplicial complexes, or monads, or differential forms with no effort at all. And since GenAI is stealing from the best textbooks, those explanations are actually quite good. And I can ask questions back! And check my work!

There is another way in which GenAI hits mathematics, this time in the way we teach it (I'll focus on uni, since this is what I know best): Uni used to be the place where you got a marginally better exposition of maths than just reading textbooks at home (and these were scarce and hard to read).

I'm quite sure that, since we cannot trust submitted "test work" anymore, we will rely more than ever on recommendations from people we know. I probably don't need to spell actually this out, but obviously this cements the hegemony of existing researcher communities, by far male and western-centric.

When I found a relevant paper, I looked at the authors' names, their home institutions, and I tried to find out whether they were connected to "my people"; whereas before AI I would have just read the paper to judge it. (I hate this so much!). The same applies to hiring PhD students:

Isn't this great, you might ask? Aren't we knocking down barriers to accessibility in maths that way? I think the opposite is true: We cannot trust any written output anymore, so we fall back to our own networks for judging who's worth listening to. I have caught myself doing this:

As anyone involved with academic journals can attest to, the drought of mathematical results has now become a flood of slop. It has become trivial to produce something that resembles a paper without any training, and without any connection to the larger math community.

Emily Riehl has compiled excellent essays on how we could be doing so much better in our community. But the system is old, and large, so kept its momentum: In the age before GenAI, proofs were a scarcity, so it seemed to make sense to reward the proof generators with tenure and grants. This is over!

course: Bill Thurston famously already said "The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves." Eugenia Cheng has written several books about how mathematics is a tool for understanding context, community, and society. In "A conversation on professional norms",

There's a ton of mathematical work that is hugely beneficial (and maybe more important) to the community which is not rewarded at all (or at least not with shiny gold coins): Teaching, Community building, writing expositions and great explanations. People have pointed this out before already, of

Watch: Fields Medalist Terence Tao on Artificial Intelligence and Why We Do Math

Crisis, what crisis? Terry Tao has summarised some of the problems quite well (www.simonsfoundation.org/2026/08/13/f...), so I won't repeat them in too much detail, but essentially: Mathematics used to be about finding new proofs first, and the "proof generators" got the majority of the math fame.

simonsfoundation.org

Watch: Fields Medalist Terence Tao on Artificial Intelligence and Why We Do Math on Simons Foundation

Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I've been thinking recently about how indigenous ways of teaching and learning could point us towards how to solve the current crisis of mathematics. My reach on Bluesky isn't exactly great so I'm yelling this at the void, but I'll just put down my thoughts here, since it lets me organise them.

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Make a band bigger Metallicona

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Are they trying to create a directory of "people you should be staying the hell away from when you meet them at a conference"?

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I'm sure my kids enjoyed the brief typography lecture I gave them when they asked me what went wrong here

Back of popcorn bag, text has all "fi" and "fl" missing (replaced by a square placeholder)

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Hi Gabriel, I found this a very useful way to think about Markov chains and I'd like to use a similar visualisation in an upcoming paper. Could you point me towards a suitable reference to properly attribute this visualisation?

Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Next up: Markus Blume verbietet das Verbot von Gabelstaplern in Fitnessstudios

Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Reading The Joy Of Abstraction by Eugenia Cheng and I love this sentence: "The point of an equation is to use the sense in which two sides are the same to pivot between the senses in which they aren't."

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

"Problem solving is just a means to an end. The core payout of pure mathematics is the neuroplastic elevation of our worldview, and we can’t get there by copy-pasting the result." This really resonated with me.

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

I took a book out from the library and unconsciously started skipping over whole pages, getting increasingly annoyed. At some point I reflected on what was making me do that and now I'm 99% sure the book is largely written by genAI. Completely unreadable garbage

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

@visualpde.com Is such an awesome website. Explaining geometric Brownian motion in a lecture tomorrow, and this tool here will help me illustrate the corresponding forward Kolmogorov equation: visualpde.com/sim?mini=JOD...

visualpde.com

Interactive simulation | VisualPDE

An interactive simulation of a partial differential equation, live in your browser with VisualPDE.

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Was this a trial run of the next generation of captchas, and she was just trying to access her HR software?

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

How did I not know before that Schrödinger was a pedophile?

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Polynesian voyaging, Coding and comparing Yahtzee bots and thinking about good strategies for playing, ... All that for an assignment that is just worth 15% of the final mark. So cool!

with a Markov chain, asking people to draw "a dot in a random location" on a piece of paper and studying whether the pattern was plausibly a Poisson point process, going (!) to a High School to teach the kids about Markov chains, learning about Bayesian inference in the context of

I'm just so proud of my students in my Random Processes class. I essentially told them "do something that is connected to probability and work on it in a group, I don't care what it is" (and gave them a list of possible ideas). They ended up doing so much cool stuff: Modelling Paper Scissors Rock

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My library hold came through! Have been looking forward to reading The Edge of Space-Time by @chanda.blacksky.app for a long time!

My hand is holding a copy of "The Edge of space-time" by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Can you also do square roots and/or logarithms that way?

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Reading @miabirdsong.bsky.social's "How we show up" and it's just really fantastic. So many cool things I need to try out.

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

They are also amazing human food btw

Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

So einen Kanzler haben wir auch noch nie ertragen müssen

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Reposted by Philipp Wacker

Jacquelyn Gill @jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

The attack on education in the US is not new, but the slow fuse that arguably started with Reagan is now setting off detonations across K-12 and higher education that are going to be incredibly difficult to walk back if we don’t treat this like the urgent crisis it is.

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Oooh where can I get that poster?

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Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

I mean the fault ultimately lies with everyone insisting on calling it "the dark side of the moon".

Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

We are supposed to spell λ "Lamda"? My life is a lie!

Philipp Wacker @phkwacker.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Conservative parties and resulting governments are, like, just bad. This is true for every country that I've ever spent time in.