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AIMO Prize Appoints Advisory Committee Members
Fields Medallists Timothy Gowers and Terence Tao appointed to the Advisory Committee for the Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Olympiad Prize, alongside Po-Shen Loh, Dan Roberts and Geoff Smith.
Update: the committee was extended in April 2024
XTX Markets is delighted to be joined by a group of prominent mathematicians, and AI and machine learning specialists. The group includes Timothy Gowers and Terence Tao, both winners of the Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics.
Alongside them are Po-Shen Loh, the former coach of the US IMO Team; Dan Roberts, an AI researcher at Sequoia Capital and MIT and a published expert in machine learning; and Geoff Smith, the former President of the IMO.
The AIMO Advisory Committee will support the development of the AIMO Prize, including advising on appropriate protocols and technical aspects, and designing the various competitions and prizes.
Advisory Committee member profiles
Timothy Gowers
After winning a gold medal in the IMO in 1981, Timothy studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he did his PhD and was then a research fellow. After a period at University College London, he returned to Trinity, first as a lecturer and then as the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics. From 2009-2020 he was a Royal Society Research Professor, and since October 2020 has been Professor of Combinatorics at the Collège de France.
He discovered the first quantitative proof of Szemerédi's theorem and has subsequently worked in additive combinatorics, for which he was awarded a Fields Medal in 1998. In recent years, he has worked on automatic theorem proving and currently heads a research group in that field, concentrating on symbolic methods.
Po-Shen Loh
Po-Shen is a mathematics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and a social entrepreneur who uses combinatorics and game theory to invent solutions ranging from education to pandemic control. He was an IMO silver medallist in his youth and then served a decade-long term as the Coach of the USA IMO Team, during which the team ranked #1 in the world four times. His lectures and events take him all over the world, reaching over 10,000 people in person and millions on YouTube each year. He received the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and is a Hertz Fellow.
Dan Roberts
Dan is an AI Fellow at Sequoia Capital and a researcher at MIT. Prior to joining Sequoia in 2023, he co-founded Diffeo, an AI company acquired by Salesforce, and was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research. As an AI researcher, he co-authored the book "The Principles of Deep Learning Theory," published by Cambridge University Press. He was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, completed a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT funded by a Hertz Fellowship, and studied in the UK as a Marshall Scholar.
Geoff Smith
Geoff Smith MBE is an activist in the mathematics olympiad community and has been involved in mathematics enrichment since 1990 and mathematics competitions since 1999. He was the elected President of the IMO between 2014 and 2022. He is the Chair of the United Kingdom Mathematics Trust and he was instrumental in setting up the European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad in 2012, an event which now prospers under female governance.
His academic career started in group theory, but later widened to include geometry and contributions to papers in the life sciences and social science. He is also an honorary reader in mathematics at the University of Bath.
Terence Tao
Terence Tao was born in Adelaide, Australia in 1975. He participated in three IMOs, culminating in a gold medal in 1987. He is a professor of mathematics at UCLA, having completed his PhD under Elias Stein at Princeton in 1996. His areas of research include harmonic analysis, PDE, combinatorics, and number theory.
He has received a number of awards, including the Salem Prize in 2000, the Fields Medal in 2006, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2007, the Crafoord prize in 2012 and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2015. Terence also holds the James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at UCLA, is a fellow of several national academies and also serves on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.