A 57-year-old math professor suddenly gives up his iron rice bowl and goes to work for his 24-year-old former student—if this had happened ten years ago, it would probably have been dismissed as academic gossip. But now? This might be the most thought-provoking signal in the AI industry.

The protagonist of the story is Ken Ono, a Japanese-American mathematician who spent many years at the University of Virginia, holding the coveted title of tenured professor. At his age, he should be enjoying his academic reputation. Instead, he jumped headfirst into a startup called Axiom Math, taking on the role of "Founding Mathematician"—which sounds mysterious, but essentially means leading the team to train AI models, design testing benchmarks, and steer research direction.

Even more dramatic, his new boss Carina Hong is only 24 and was once his student. How impressive is she? She finished dual degrees in math and physics at MIT in three years, won the Morgan Prize—the top undergraduate math award in North America—then went on to pursue dual PhDs in math and law at Stanford, but dropped out halfway to start a business because she wanted more. She previously worked on Meta’s cutting-edge AI team, has strong connections, brought together a team of former Meta researchers, and shortly after founding the company raised $64 million, with the valuation soaring to $300 million.

Why did Ken Ono make this change? He admits that he used to be skeptical about AI doing math, thinking these models were at best just calculators. But after witnessing the latest AI models’ performance in mathematical reasoning and proof, his entire outlook was turned upside down. Axiom Math has a clear goal: to make AI a true “mathematician” capable of reasoning, writing proofs, and conducting formal verification on its own. Reportedly, they’ve already cracked several problems that have stumped academia for decades, and their commercialization is underway—fields like financial engineering and security auditing are already lining up.

There’s a bigger logic behind all this: as large models have developed to this point, their reasoning ability has hit a bottleneck, and mathematical capability has become the key to breakthrough. Ken Ono’s leap is essentially the academic world stamping its approval on this track. As for whether this big gamble will pay off? Time will tell, but for now, this combination is electrifying.