Mathematics

For nearly eight decades, the sharpest mathematical minds on the planet stared at a deceptively simple geometry puzzle and came up empty. Then an AI chatbot cracked it in two weeks. On May 20, OpenAI announced that one of its internal reasoning models had autonomously disproved a famous conjecture posed by legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946. The result has been independently verified by a panel including Fields medalist Tim Gowers — and it’s being called the first time AI has independently solved a prominent open problem in active mathematical research. ...

A 23-year-old with no math degree typed an unsolved conjecture into ChatGPT on a Monday afternoon. Eighty minutes later, he had a valid proof that defeated professional mathematicians for sixty years. Fields Medalist Terence Tao confirmed it. The math world is losing its mind. The Kid Who Didn’t Know It Was Hard Liam Price wasn’t trying to make history. He was “vibe mathing” — his term for feeding random open problems into GPT-5.4 Pro to see what happens. He’d been doing it for months with his friend Kevin Barreto, a Cambridge undergrad, pulling unsolved conjectures from erdosproblems.com like lottery tickets. ...