AI and the power of human imagination

Matthew Matthew Syed is right (comment, Oct 5) that, far from threatening science, AI will drive it. This is something we are seeing in our research at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences. In my own work, AI has revealed correlations among elliptic curves, which we call “murmurations”. These expose hidden symmetries in number theory with possible applications in cryptography and cybersecurity. My colleague Dr Evgeny Sobko uses AI to identify integrable quantum systems that could transform our understanding of materials. In China and the US, such AI-assisted discovery in physics and maths is being pursued at scale, but government support in the UK remains piecemeal.

Most funding has gone to the Alan Turing Institute, where researchers have less freedom to follow their curiosity than at independent institutes like ours. If there is a crisis of imagination, it lies not with scientists but with those who allocate research funding. It’s time for the government — and private donors — to show imagination of their own and back the AI-assisted research that is reshaping discovery itself.

Prof. Yang-Hui He is a fellow at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.