Disappearing Grants, Genius Grants, and the AI Proofs with Lauren K. Williams

Okay, Lauren, so back in October, you found out that you won a MacArthur Genius Grant.

This is this incredible honor, and I'm curious, not the math yet, but just emotionally, what did it feel like to find this out? And especially, you were the only mathematician among the 22 winners, so what, what did that feel like to represent math in this way?

So it was a, it was a very strange, uh, and surreal experience.

I want to mention that the backstory is that back in May of 2025, essentially all the federal math and science grants at Harvard were canceled.

I had a NSF individual grant for my research, and I had two NSF conference grants, and they were just terminated in one fell swoop in May, which was incredibly stressful, in part because I was organizing a conference at Harvard the first week of June, and I was using a conference grant to do so.

And so to all of a sudden have the funding yanked out from underneath us was, um, was, um, was very, very stressful.

And then in the months that followed, I would say that I and most of my colleagues were quite demoralized.

It felt like higher education and scientific research were at this period of existential crisis.

Still feels like that way, by the way.

But then in, in the fall, I got this call from the MacArthur Foundation saying that I had, I had been awarded this, this grant, and it was just this shock, this amazing gift, which first of all told me that somebody cared about my research after all, and second, that I would have the funding to be able to keep doing the work that I was doing.

So it was an, an incredible gift, and it couldn't have come at a better time.

And did you know you were in the running, or was this completely out of the blue?

No, no, it was completely out of the blue.

Um, the way things work is that they're done by anonymous nomination, so I have no idea, you know.

I had no idea that I was being considered.