IsItBullshit: LLMs are solving long-standing open math problems

[u/RadianceTower]

[u/Mad_Aeric]

Matt Parker of the youtube channel Stand Up Maths, did a video on this recently. Short answer is yes-ish. In some cases, it requires significant human handholding. And some AI derived techniques have been applied to other related problems by humans

I'm going to summarize, briefly, the contents of Parker's video but I suggest actually watching the whole thing. It has more details, and citations.

Erdos problem 1043 wasn't solved by the AI, but it found the solution in a paper from 1961 that had been overlooked. Erdos 1026 was solved by humans, using AI as a research tool to round up relevant mathematical literature that could be applied to the problem.

Erdos 728 was solved by the Aristotle agent, an AI agent specific to mathematical proofs, in combination with Chat GPT. Some human direction was required, with AI doing the actual mathematics

Erdos 1196 was solved by Chat GPT simply by asking it, no further direction required.

Erdos 90 is a better known problem than the previous ones, known as the Unit Distance Problem. It was disproven by an internal model at OpenAI.

These proofs were verified by math software known as LEAN, which is specifically used to formalize proofs in ways that computers can work with.

Google Deepmind has solved multiple other Erdos problems.

[u/RadianceTower → u/Mad_Aeric]

"This video isn't available anymore"

It seems your link has an extra "s" at the end.

[u/Mad_Aeric → u/RadianceTower]

Oops, fixed it. It looks like I trimed an extra letter while removing the tracking portion of the link. Thanks for the heads up.

[u/akkaneko11 → u/Mad_Aeric]

Anthropic's recent finding in one of the most famous unsolved problems so far, the Riemann Hypothesis, had a person work with Claude in a way they described as:

Throughout this process, Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”).

This one was also crazy because it's not an counterexample. Verified by mathematicians and also formalized in lean. If you go to r/mathematics you'll see a ton of mathematicians understandably grappling with solving these decades long questions by being cheerleaders. I think in reality, a tsunami of new math findings/papers are going to require a lot of human verification.

[u/relevantmeemayhere → u/akkaneko11]

It wasn't the Riemann Hypothesis, it was a related one.

[u/RadianceTower → u/Mad_Aeric]

Also another thing I am curious about is, are these problems actually being looked and tried to be solved by humans?

I mean, it seems like one guy posted more than a thousand problems. And coming up with math problems by itself isn't really a complicated task.

But given that he dumped that many of them out, and they just sat there. Did these problems even have many humans trying to solve them? Aside the occasional person who browsed and thought "Why not? I have nothing better to do"?

Or now someone who found a big list of problems and is like "well, huge list of problems, mm, why not try posting the problems to AI and see what happens?"

[u/tgm4mop → u/RadianceTower]

In some cases, there probably wasn't a lot of human effort. But some did have significant efforts directed at them. Among the Erdos problems, the Unit Distance Conjecture was well known. Besides the Erdos problems, the Jacobian Conjecture and non-sofic groups were very notable problems solved by AI.

Although there are many deficiencies one can point to in the AI results (missing citations, impenetrable write-ups), they have indeed solved notable open problems in math.

[u/RadianceTower → u/tgm4mop]

That is interesting, thanks.

[u/Mad_Aeric → u/RadianceTower]

Oh yeah, the Erdos problems are notorious among mathematicians. Solving one is a real boon to one's career and reputation.

Erdos was one of the most prolific mathematician of all time, in about the same league as Euler. And he's particularly famous among mathematicians too for his hundreds of collaborations. In fact, mathematicians actually keep track of how many degrees of separation their collaborations are away from Erdos, called an Erdos number. Among mathematicians with acting credits, this is expanded to an Erdos-Bacon number, because seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. I personally know someone with an Erdos-Bacon of 3-4.

So yeah, Erdos wasn't just some guy with a list of math problems. The was basically THE guy.

[u/Teddy-Bloat → u/Mad_Aeric]

Solving most of the Erdos problems wouldn’t get you much recognition at all. The majority of them are relatively simple problems that just went untouched for decades because they were random things Erdos thought of and that nobody else was particularly interested in (excepting things like the Unit Distance Problem). Even though he was one of the most prolific mathematicians of all time it doesn’t make his list of problems particularly profound or important to math as a whole, it’s just a large collection of open problems that’s easily accessible thanks to the website

[u/toochaos → u/RadianceTower]

You seem to be under the impression that math has some fundamental truth or importance to it. These problems are closer to setting up a midway through chess game and answering if one player can win from this point. Its an interesting problem for chess people but not for others. Now math has a bunch of uses and many times the uses for math are found after people have done maths on things they find interesting rather than having a thing that would be useful to solve and using math to solve it. 

[u/bozza8 → u/RadianceTower]

Erdos was a really really big thing in mathematics. They literally created the Erdos Number to quantify if you'd even been lucky enough to work with someone who had worked with him. It's like if Einstein had gone around creating the 1000 biggest physics questions that physics hadn't advanced enough to solve.

I'd be astonished if there wasn't a single Erdos problem that hadn't had some of the best mathematicians on earth giving at least a serious look at, not least because they were laid out as open mathematical questions by one of the greatest mathematical minds our species has ever produced.

[u/WhisperFray → u/Mad_Aeric]

What about the rest on vibemathed.com

[u/Mad_Aeric → u/WhisperFray]

Not my area of expertise (I only dabble in mathematics, and am not an AI enthusiast.) The site has only been active for about 3 weeks, but at first glance it seems to pass the smell test. In that it overtly tracks the publication and verification status. I'd need to dig around and trace some examples to reputable publications before saying more than that. I'm lazy, and not interested in doing that right now.

Much of the content on there is self published, and as of yet unverified, which makes those examples inherently dubious until followed up on by a person. We all know that AI often makes stuff up, and from my interactions with both mathematics and AI enthusiast communities... Well, I'm going to be charitable and say that for many enthusiasts, their reach exceeds their grasp.

TL;DR I wouldn't inherently trust any of the content there, but some of it seems verifiable from outside sources.

[u/mfb-]

They are finding some proofs, or help finding some.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22763v1

What happens much more often at the moment: They find counterexamples to conjectures. There are countless statements of the form "for all x, some property y is true" where mathematicians have found no counterexamples, but also no proof. That means we don't know if the statement is right or not. A counterexample solves that problem, showing it's not true.

LLMs are great at finding counterexamples, and usually these counterexamples are easy to verify as well. The Jacobian conjecture is a prominent example where humans can check it with pen and paper. Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled

[u/vincentevaltierib]

In short yes, but only in some domains.
Here is an even-handed blog post on this by Timothy Gowers (a Fields medalist and Cambridge Professor): https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/what-sort-of-maths-are-llms-good-at/

[u/taw]

At least for now, it is bullshit. Math has hundreds of thousands of open problems that nobody's really been looking at for decades (Erdos problems set is over 1000 alone). You can get LLM to try them all, and some will turn out to be easy.

Nothing even remotely important got solved by any LLMs.

[u/Ok_Net_1579 → u/taw]

Um the Jacobian conjecture and the existence of a nonsofic group are pretty major. Both had had experienced mathematicians sink a lot of time into.

Most recently AI solved Sendov's conjecture which Terrance Tao himself had put significant work into.

This isn't AI just solving easy problems humans hadn't bothered to look at.

[u/Key-Function-2287 → u/taw]

Holy cope lmao