mathematics
Start-ups are racing to revolutionise mathematics with AI
Mathematicians have never been so sought after by the world's richest people. At universities across the world, academics are seeing their colleagues mysteriously disappear and join private companies. Some of these companies are household names, like OpenAI and Google, but others are newly formed and just months old, hoping to capitalise on a moment in which mathematics is seen as the secret ingredient with which to improve artificial intelligence - which may in turn transform mathematics itself. "Last May, I was honestly kind of grieving for my scientific identity," says Ken Ono, who in 2025 went on leave from a professorship at the University of Virginia to join Axiom Math, a start-up aiming to build a maths-focused AI. Ono had been asked by a different company, called Epoch AI, to help craft a set of hard-to-solve maths problems that would test AI's problem-solving ability .
On the Subgaussianity of Quantized Linear Maps: An AI-Assisted Note
Zou, Guangyi, Vershynin, Roman
Simone Bombari asked us whether the 1-bit quantized random vector Y = sgn(Wx) has subgaussian norm bounded by a universal constant. Here W is an n n random Gaussian matrix, and x is an independent standard normal random vector in Rn. The question is nontrivial since the coordinates of Y are not independent. We give a strong positive answer to this question - for any bounded map instead of sgn() - using AI: AIDiscovery and Generalization (Theorem 1): To handle coordinate dependence, Gemini 3.5 Flash1 proposed decomposing the Gaussian vector into independent parts, using one part to "smooth" the sign function, and then applying Gaussian concentration for Lipschitz functions.
OpenAI makes breakthrough on 80-year-old maths problem
If you take a sheet of paper and add some dots, how many pairs can be the same distance apart? If you take a sheet of paper and add some dots, how many pairs can be the same distance apart? OpenAI has claimed a further advance in AI reasoning after its technology successfully tackled an 80-year-old maths problem. The company behind ChatGPT said it had made a breakthrough with a challenge first posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946: the planar unit distance problem. The question posed by Erdős is simple to explain.
Mathematicians stunned by AI's biggest breakthrough in mathematics yet
Mathematicians stunned by AI's biggest breakthrough in mathematics yet An 80-year-old maths conjecture that has eluded the world's greatest mathematicians has been cracked by an artificial intelligence model built by OpenAI. The result has stunned experts and is being hailed as a seismic moment for AI's mathematical ability. "This is a problem that I didn't expect to see solved in my lifetime," says Misha Rudnev at the University of Bristol, UK. "It's absolutely a bomb." Tim Gowers at the University of Cambridge wrote that the solution is "a milestone in AI mathematics" in a blog post accompanying the work . "If a human had written the paper and submitted it to the and I had been asked for a quick opinion, I would have recommended acceptance without any hesitation. No previous AI-generated proof has come close to that."
DeepMath - Deep Sequence Models for Premise Selection
Geoffrey Irving, Christian Szegedy, Alexander A. Alemi, Niklas Een, Francois Chollet, Josef Urban
We study the effectiveness of neural sequence models for premise selection in automated theorem proving, one of the main bottlenecks in the formalization of mathematics. We propose a two stage approach for this task that yields good results for the premise selection task on the Mizar corpus while avoiding the handengineered features of existing state-of-the-art models. To our knowledge, this is the first time deep learning has been applied to theorem proving on a large scale.
Maryna Viazovska's proofs of sphere packing formalized with AI
The proofs that earned EPFL professor Maryna Viazovska the Fields Medal in 2022 have reached a new milestone: their complete formalization by computer, achieved through a collaboration between mathematicians and artificial intelligence tools. In 2016, Maryna Viazovska solved the sphere packing problem in dimension 8, proving that the E lattice constitutes the densest possible arrangement. Shortly after, together with collaborators, she established an analogous result in dimension 24 using the Leech lattice. Her method provided an elegant solution to a problem studied for centuries, with close ties to applied fields such as error-correcting codes. For this major contribution, Viazovska was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022, the highest distinction in mathematics.
NATURALPROVER: Grounded Mathematical Proof Generation with Language Models
Theorem proving in natural mathematical language - the mixture of symbolic and natural language used by humans - plays a central role in mathematical advances and education, and tests aspects of reasoning that are core to intelligence. Yet it has remained underexplored with modern generative models. We study largescale language models on two new generation tasks: suggesting the next step in a mathematical proof, and full proof generation. We develop NATURALPROVER,a language model that generates proofs by conditioning on background references (e.g.
How we discovered the speed limit of arithmetic – and broke it
Some seemingly simple sequences of multiplication and addition grow so quickly that they question the very foundations of mathematics. Did you hear the one about the man who invented chess and got himself executed? Legend has it that a man called Sessa, who lived in India long ago, developed the rules for the game and presented them to a king. The king was delighted and offered the man his pick of reward. Sessa asked for a supposedly humble quantity of rice.