AI keeps cracking unsolved math problems, and

What happened

AI had already helped solve other math problems, including other Erdos problems, but many mathematicians considered this the most significant example yet. Just one week later, human researchers adapted the core proof technique and used it to disprove another major conjecture. Since then, the floodgates have been open, and barely a day goes by without more news about AI in mathematics.

" If fewer people spend years developing deep expertise, he fears the math literature could expand enormously within a decade or two while no human community remains that truly understands it. Gowers raised these concerns in a post about the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics, an effort to define standards for AI's use in the field.

More than 3,000 mathematicians have signed the declaration, which is backed by the International Mathematical Union. Rather than rejecting AI, it calls for transparency when researchers use AI tools, protection of authors' rights, and continued human responsibility for mathematical results. Gowers hasn't signed it, but he broadly supports it. That burst of progress doesn't mean AI can solve everything.

According to Bazett, AI performs far better in some areas of math than in others. Fields such as graph theory have proven especially well suited to machine-generated proofs, while others remain resistant. For every problem AI solves, many more remain beyond its reach. Epoch AI's benchmark puts numbers behind those limits. In the two hardest categories, "Major Advance" and "Breakthrough," AI has yet to solve a single problem.

Why it matters

Models are finding counterexamples, spotting broader patterns, and helping researchers turn arguments into machine-checkable proofs. Epoch AI, the research group best known for its demanding "FrontierMath" AI benchmark, recently announced the second solution in "FrontierMath: Open Problems," a test drawn from major unsolved questions in math. OpenAI's new Astra model also appears designed for this work: The lab introduced it with ten solutions of varying difficulty.

5 Pro for routine work that would previously have taken weeks. " Saha said most mathematicians don't realize this is already possible, and he expects the field to split over how it responds. "Some will adapt soon, and find boundless possibilities," he wrote. " The American folk hero worked himself to death competing against a steam drill.

Saha represents a group of researchers who treat AI as a productivity tool rather than an attack on their field. Writing in The Conversation, mathematician Trefor Bazett says AI and human ingenuity could usher in a new golden age of mathematics.

He cites an April 2026 paper from a team of Carnegie Mellon University mathematicians that solved an open problem in Ramsey theory by combining SAT solvers, code generated by language models, and formal proof verification. The paper explicitly connects that result to a "golden age" that Fields Medal winner Timothy Gowers predicted in 2000. Gowers imagined computers handling routine checks while mathematicians focused on deeper ideas.

"In other words, computers would still do the boring bits for us, but these would not be quite as boring as they are now," he wrote. The Carnegie Mellon researchers believe that period has now begun. "We believe that we are now entering this golden age, thanks to the combination of several technologies," they write. But Gowers didn't expect it to last.

" Now that his prediction is starting to come true, Gowers has mixed feelings. 6 Pro solved a problem on its first attempt after he had spent considerable time working on it. "It felt very strange and not particularly pleasant to have the rug pulled out from under my feet like that," he writes on his blog, though he was still glad to see the problems solved.

What to watch

The six remaining Millennium Prize Problems, each carrying a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute, remain as far out of reach for AI as they are for humans. OpenAI's Astra couldn't solve them either, though OpenAI researcher Noam Brown believes more computing power could change that. Bazett says students who spend years developing their math skills have understandable reasons to worry that AI could replace human researchers.

" Mathematician Terence Tao laid out a cautiously optimistic view in his talk at the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians. He compares the current period to the foundational crisis of the early 20th century, when paradoxes and incompleteness theorems forced mathematicians to reexamine the field's basic assumptions.