Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz says his field needs rizz in the AI era

Steven Strogatz, a professor of mathematics at Cornell, tells Business Insider that mathematicians need "rizz" in the AI era. Rizz is slang for charisma, and the word choice is doing deliberate work: an argument about professional identity travels further dressed as slang than it does stated plainly.

The claim underneath the packaging is less frivolous than it sounds. When machines handle execution — the calculation, the drafting, the checking — what remains for the human is taste and persuasion: judgment about which problems are worth attacking, and the ability to make anyone else care about the answer. A model can verify the work; it cannot decide which work matters, and it cannot make a room want to hear about it. On Strogatz's account, the mathematician of the future starts to resemble the salesman of the present.

The reasoning is not specific to mathematics. Any expert profession whose technical core a model can now perform faces the same revaluation: the machine does the work, the human decides what is worth doing and sells the result. Law, code, analysis — the revaluation is the same in each. The credential survives; the premium migrates to whoever can hold attention.

Strogatz is the most media-accustomed figure in his field — a bestselling author and podcast host whose own career consists of translating mathematics for audiences outside it. His conclusion, that communication and charisma are now the profession's scarce resources, describes the position he already occupies: the one mathematician who built a career on public explanation has determined that public explanation is what mathematics now requires.

The word was chosen for quotability rather than precision. It is being quoted.