Terry Tao is the most famous and award-laden mathematician working today. He is known for his groundbreaking work in many areas of mathematics and when he speaks, people listen. A few weeks ago he took to the stage at the International Congress of Mathematics, held every four years, to give his lecture, “Mathematics in the Age of AI.” He voiced concern about what he called an unprecedented threat. “AI has created a crisis in our mathematical values and practices,” he said, and his words resonated because, just days before, Anthropic’s Claude Fable AI program had solved the so-called Jacobian conjecture which has puzzled mathematicians since 1939. It was a devastating achievement, all the more so because the solution fitted into a single tweet.

But the Jacobian conjecture is far from the only high-level math problem toppled by AI this year. In May, OpenAI announced that it had cracked the “unit distance” problem. Eighty years of struggle by mathematicians was ended by a simple inquiry to a chatbot. Experts praised the solution as elegant and clever. Daniel Litt of the University of Toronto, who was asked by OpenAI to verify the proof, said: “This is the unique interesting result produced autonomously by AI so far.”

Math is at a watershed because AI is producing solutions faster than mathematicians can read them

Math is at a watershed because AI is producing solutions faster than mathematicians can read them

Then, last month, OpenAI announced that it had solved ten major problems in mathematics........

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