Terry Tao Revives 25-Year-Old Math Applets Using AI Coding Agents

The Fields Medalist used AI agents to port two dozen Java visualization applets to JavaScript in hours, found only one minor bug, and discovered two bugs in his own original code — all while building new relativistic and number-theory tools from scratch.

Fields Medalist Terence Tao has used modern AI coding agents to revive two dozen mathematical visualization applets he wrote in Java back in 1999, porting them to JavaScript in what he describes as "a matter of hours." The process, he writes, was "painless" — across all the ported applets, he found only one minor bug, while the agent independently discovered two bugs in his original code.

Tao started coding Java applets in 1999 for his complex analysis and linear algebra courses, but the web stopped supporting that version of Java years ago, rendering them non-functional. The revived applets now run natively in modern browsers, with upgrades like colorized Besicovitch set renderings.

Emboldened by the results, Tao went further. He revived an abandoned 1999 project — a visualization tool for special relativity he described as "Inkscape, but in Minkowski space" — and completed it in a couple of hours of "vibe coding." He then built an interactive visualization for the Gilbreath conjecture to accompany a paper he published the same day.

His verdict is characteristically measured: since these interactive supplements are "not mission-critical to the core of the paper," the downside risk of using LLM-generated code is acceptable. Tao says he plans to add similar visualizations to future papers.

The story hit the top of Hacker News with over 300 points, resonating with developers who see AI-assisted "nice-to-have" tooling as one of the technology's highest-leverage use cases — turning ideas that were always too time-consuming to build into things that get built in an afternoon.

Sources: Terence Tao — What's New, Hacker News Discussion