$10 million Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Olympiad 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.

LONDON, Feb. 7, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- XTX Markets' newly created Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Olympiad Prize ('AIMO Prize') is a $10mn challenge fund designed to spur the creation of a publicly shared AI model capable of winning a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

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.

Terence Tao, Fields Medallist and Professor of Mathematics at UCLA, commented:

"Despite recent advances, using AI to solve, or at least assist with solving, advanced mathematical problems remains an incredibly complicated and multifaceted challenge. It will be important to experiment with multiple approaches to this goal, and to benchmark the performance of each of them.

The AIMO Prize promises to provide at least one such set of benchmarks which will help compare different AI problem solving strategies at a technical level, in a manner that will be accessible and appealing to the broader public."

Timothy Gowers, Fields Medallist and Professor of Combinatorics at the Collège de France, commented:

"Machine learning methods have had spectacular success in several domains, but their performance on tasks that involve multi-step reasoning still lags behind. For this reason, solving advanced mathematics problems has been increasingly recognised as a major frontier for AI, the passing of which has the potential to open up a new wave of important applications. The AIMO prize will play a valuable role by stimulating research in this direction.

It is particularly welcome that the prizes are for publicly available research, as this will lead to faster and more efficient progress.''

There will be a grand prize of $5mn for the first publicly shared AI model to enter an AIMO approved competition and perform at a standard equivalent to a gold medal in the IMO. There will also be a series of progress prizes, totalling up to $5mn, for publicly shared AI models that achieve key milestones towards the grand prize.

The first AIMO approved competitions will open to participants in early 2024. There will be a presentation of progress held in Bath, England in July 2024, as part of the 65th IMO. More information on the progress prizes will be shared shortly.

Eoghan Flanagan, Director of the AIMO Prize, commented:

"We are delighted to welcome such esteemed members of the mathematical community to the advisory committee of the AIMO Prize. I look forward to working with them on developing and growing the Prize."

For more information and updates on the AIMO Prize visit: https://aimoprize.com/

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.

About XTX Markets:

XTX Markets is a leading financial technology firm which partners with counterparties, exchanges and e-trading venues globally to provide liquidity in the Equity, FX, Fixed Income and Commodity markets. XTX has over 200 employees based in London, Paris, New York, Mumbai, Yerevan and Singapore. XTX is consistently a top 5 liquidity provider globally in FX (Euromoney 2018-present) and is also the largest European equities (systematic internaliser) liquidity provider (Rosenblatt FY: 2020-2023).

The company's corporate philanthropy focuses on STEM education and maximum impact giving (alongside an employee matching programme). Since 2017, XTX has donated over £100mn to charities and good causes, establishing it as a major donor in the UK and globally.

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