Get Quartz in your inbox

Free daily briefing on global business news.

Math has a new problem

Mathematicians are weighing the breakthroughs against errors, verification concerns, and the future of mathematical research

H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock/Getty Images

A version of this article originally appeared in Quartz’s AI & Tech newsletter. Sign up here to get the latest AI & tech news, analysis and insights straight to your inbox.

On the last morning of a weeklong national holiday in China, a mathematician checked his phone and found one email after another with the same PDF. It was a list of unsolved math problems, and OpenAI had just claimed answers to many of them.

In a post on the Proofs and Prompts blog that collected more than a hundred reactions from mathematicians around the world, Fudan University professor Xiaolei Wu, who works in group theory, described reading the list of solved problems. “It looked unreal,” he wrote. “These were almost all the major open problems in my field!”

OpenAI posted the 722 papers to GitHub on the night of October 6, all written by an unreleased AI model that had been pointed at roughly 4,000 open problems. Mathematicians have spent the time since deciding whether to cheer or grieve, and some, like Wu, seemed to do a little of both.

A flood of........

© Quartz