Jon Borwein: Position Statement

I wrote the article described below as a contribution to a series of articles in the Conversation [1] (an excellent on-line Australian news and policy daily) under the rubric of "If I had a blind cheque in my subject...."

As you can see, I took the opportunity to talk about what a really first-rate digital library would offer mathematicians. I chose to consider the impact of Watson (IBM's Jeopardy winning program) if it were tuned for mathematics.

Project: Recalibrate Watson to solve maths problems Cost: $500 million Timeframe: Five years

Mathematics has many grand challenge problems, but none that can potentially be settled by pouring in more money – unlike the case of the Large Hadron Collider, the Square Kilometre Array or other such projects. Maths is a different beast. But, of course, you’re offering me unlimited, free dosh, so I should really think of something. (Continue reading original at [2].

Since this article was written, a new program Dr Fill [3], has competed against ``600 of the nation’s best human solvers at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn." Dr Fill finished a respectable 141st. I predict that within three years he/she/it will win.

When combined with advances in optical character recognition for mathematics, Watson and Dr Fill, along with the continuing impact of Moore's law [4], make it imperative that any World Digital Library of Mathematics be built to be fully cognisant of future uses. As Bailey and I wrote at the end of our discussion of Moore's law [5]:

It is not a big leap to imagine that within the next ten years tailored and massively more powerful versions of Siri(Apple’s new iPhone assistant) will be an integral part of mathematics, not to mention medicine, law and just about every other part of human life. ... [I]t is clear that the digital future looks very bright indeed. We will likely look back at the present day with the same technological disdain with which we currently view the 1960s.

So we must make sure that we plan for the future and not only the present or the past.