Source: Terence Tao — 2026-07-16
Summary
Mathematician Terence Tao published a follow-up post to his ongoing series on using modern coding agents to rapidly build interactive applications, this time sharing two new visualization tools. One renders the "zeta process" — a chain of zeta-distributed random naturals forming an infinite-divisibility stochastic process from one of his recent papers — and the other visualizes celestial and terrestrial motion across both human and astronomical scales. Tao frames both as apps he wouldn't previously have had time to build by hand, now made tractable by agent-assisted development.
Key Takeaways
- The zeta-process visualization ties directly to Tao's own recent research paper (co-authored with Alexeev, Barreto, Li, Lichtman, Price, Shah, and Tang), turning an abstract stochastic-process construction into something explorable interactively.
- The second app tackles a much harder visualization problem: rendering motion at wildly different scales — human-scale terrestrial movement alongside astronomical-scale celestial motion — in a single coherent interface.
- This continues a pattern from Tao's earlier posts in the same series, where he's previously used coding agents to revive and rebuild old applications in hours rather than the weeks such projects used to take.
- The recurring theme across the series is less about any single app and more about a shift in what's economically worth building: visualization tools that were previously "not worth the time" for a working mathematician are now cheap enough to just try.