Controversy over ‘Mathathon’ at Caltech

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A view of the Millikan Library at Caltech, 2013. | Photo Credit: Canon.vs.nikon (CC BY-SA)

A new event at the California Institute of Technology, called ‘Mathathon’, pulled together by a group of undergraduate students to “promote the responsible use of AI in mathematics” quickly ran into controversy last week.

Scheduled for October 30 to November 1 this year, its first round will have 100 teams of mathematicians work on open problems in mathematics for 40 hours, with each team receiving around $20,000 worth of tokens to use on frontier AI models. The teams that have made the most progress will enter a second round that will be six months long. According to the organisers, the event aims in part to increase the exposure of mathematicians outside AI companies to powerful models.

However, on September 10, a coalition of current and former Caltech mathematicians published an open letter, signed by over 700 of their peers, including four Fields Medal winners, asking for the Mathathon to be called off. The letter said the Mathathon’s accelerated format would encourage “slop” mathematics that other mathematicians must then spend time and effort to correct and verify. Because OpenAI and Anthropic had sponsored the event, the letter also accused AI companies of turning open mathematics problems into publicity contests while draining mathematics of its human and social resources.

While the organisers subsequently changed some of the Mathathon’s rules, including requiring participants in the second round to publish their work as preprint papers on the arXiv repository, they refused to cancel the event. However, OpenAI withdrew as a sponsor; the website currently says Anthropic will provide $600,000 in credits.

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