The UK government has announced cuts to the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme that provides support for promising mathematicians to make them excel. Many in the UK maths and education community are up in arms, arguing that that this will cut off the very AI innovation Prime Minister Keir Starmer says we most need. Is it an ideological "anti-elitist" cut, or a failure to understand the connection between maths and AI? Or are they planning to switch the funding to back a modern, advanced, computer-based maths alternative?

To all those who've got good A-level maths and/or further maths grades—well done! Being focused enough to do this and having a sense of achievement and confidence from it is well worthwhile. To those who have had another "maths failure", it's important you see this in context.

So many people have asked me about the US “math wars” during my recent visit, that I thought I’d comment in a blog, rather than repeat myself over and over again. Briefing for those not in the US: there is open warfare between “reformers” and “non-reformers” of math education. The latest round is ostensibly over whether “data science” should be accepted as an alternative to traditional subjects like “algebra II” for admission to top colleges.

Every day people and AIs are being compared, their character—personas—and abilities.

There’s a much longer running Wolfram tradition. Comparing people with animals, sock puppets or desk toys. Which animal has the expression of which person you know? Which desk toy best represents the person sitting opposite in a meeting? Or which crocheted animal—a hobby of my daughter’s, prompted by my colleague Lianne’s vast constructed collection?

Now Computers Talk “Human”, Do Humans Need to Talk “Computer”? As with fellow humans, we often talk to computers with language. The big news for 2023 is how computers will now talk “human” as never before—so much so that they really appear as our species (no, any bots reading this…not you…). Does that mean we never need to speak “computer”, i.e. program syntactically? Will LLM technology (like ChatGPT) mean we can drop this recent, evolving form of discourse, familiar to most but used by only an elite few?