What I Learned at a Drunk-Math Party
The day before the drunk-math party, I took the Caltrain south from San Francisco to Stanford to hang out with a pair of fifth-year math Ph.D.s who are thinking specifically about how AI is reshaping their discipline.
Key points
- Asking AI researchers and start-up founders who spend their evenings at math parties to rate themselves on quantitative skill is a dicey proposition: Even those who majored in the field will report that they are bad for fear that an International Mathematical Olympiad medalist is in the room.
- The coffee shop where I met them is wedged inside Stanford’s electrical-engineering building, several hundred feet from the auditorium where, as a freshman, I took my last math exam.
- At first glance, it looks like any other San Francisco house party: bottles of cheap liquor on the table and awkward conversations in the living room.
We are going to see who, while drunk, can score highest on a set of past problems from Oxford’s math-and-computer-science undergraduate-entrance exam.
Normally this exam is taken individually, but for the party, the host sorts us into teams based on our self-professed math abilities.
Additional details
- “What is it that mathematicians even do?” a young man across from me on the bus recently asked his friend as we heaved up Fillmore.
- Once everyone is drunk, the host sends out the exam, a 13-page document with both multiple-choice and long-answer questions.
- How strange, I think, to be doing math recreationally in the place where it’s all being automated.
- Not only are we competing against one another; a parallel party is taking place in New York City.
- Like the men on the bus, I too have recently become a bandwagon math fan.
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