Terence Tao
AssessTools
A mathematician cited as an example of expert-level prompting and reasoning with ChatGPT.
Why it's here
Placed in Assess: 2 article(s) of evidence from 1 source(s), led by research-stage coverage, with 1 in the last 30 days. Confidence 35%.
Evidence (2)
- 4Hacker News·9/19/2026researchGrant Sanderson argues for rewarding mathematical explanations
In a guest post on Terence Tao’s blog, Grant Sanderson argues that mathematics should value motivated explanations more explicitly, not just proofs. He says this would better reflect how mathematicians actually build understanding and help the public see what researchers contribute beyond generating proofs.
- 4Hacker News·8/3/2026researchDomain expertise makes LLM prompting more effective
The post argues that the biggest skill in using LLMs is not generic prompt engineering, but deep domain knowledge. Using Terence Tao’s discussion with ChatGPT about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample, it shows how expertise helps users ask better questions, spot issues, and steer the model toward useful answers. It also suggests that as models improve, human expertise remains important because the main bottleneck is often expressing the right problem to the model.