Related updates
[This is a guest post by Ben Antieau , cross-posted from his blog . — T.] There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist— somewhere in some hexagon. —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” [1] New repository I am writing to announce Hexagon , a new repository for research works in the mathematical sciences and theoretical computer science. This has been a joint effort of man
Science Sep 4, 2026 We are sharing the first complete computer-checked proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Claude worked largely autonomously over 11 days to write the proof in the Lean programming language. Below, we describe how the formalization was done and share some thoughts about what this work could mean for research mathematics. Around 1637, Pierre de Fermat jotted down a claim in the margin of his copy of Dioph
The author recounts attending a workshop on mathematics and AI, which produced the Leiden Declaration, now signed by over 3000 people. Although he did not sign, he clarifies it is not due to disagreement but rather uncertainty about some confident assertions and recommendations. He appreciates the declaration's role in focusing attention on pressing issues, and quotes its passage on characteristic values of mathemati
It’s been an interesting few weeks for counterexamples. This post is basically my perspective of what has been going on in the world of formalization, AI tools and, in particular, counterexamples. Unit distance Two months ago today (20th May 2026), ChatGPT disproved Erdős’ Unit Distance conjecture in discrete geometry. This is now old news but I had to start somewhere. The announcement was accompanied with testimonie
I’m organizing a workshop in London on July 6th to 10th (2026) whose goal is to work on my EPSRC-funded project formalizing Fermat’s Last theorem in Lean. The initial aim of the project was to reduce FLT to theorems known in the 1980s, i.e. “formalize the Wiles/Taylor–Wiles papers” (although actually we are formalizing a more modern proof whose ideas go back to a strategy proposed by Khare). I have just finished givi
Let’s say that someone had a big pot of money, and wanted to use it to accelerate mathematical discovery. How might they go about doing this? The traditional approach Historically it has been governments who have been driving this agenda, with taxpayer-funded institutions such as the NSF (in the US), the EPSRC (in the UK), the ERC (in Europe) and many other national institutions (NSERC, ARC, DFG, JSPS…) typically fun
[This is a guest post by Boris Alexeev . Now over to Boris.] I’m here to tell you about various exciting developments centering on Erdős problems, especially involving the formalization of old and new mathematics using artificial intelligence. Background As is well known, Paul Erdős was a prolific mathematician of the 20th century who posed an extraordinary number of conjectures. Around May 2023 , Thomas Bloom set up
So it’s an interesting time for computers-doing-mathematics. A couple of interesting things happened in the last few days, which have inspired me to write about the question more broadly. First there is the question on whether computers will ever prove interesting research-level mathematical theorems autonomously at all, which is really hard to answer right now, although clearly a lot of people are betting on “yes”.