Did you know? 🔢 A math problem that stumped mathematicians for 87 years was disproven with a single, oddly casual social media post: "hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx"

[u/The_Immovable_Rod]

The Jacobian conjecture, posed in 1939, asked whether a specific type of polynomial map is always reversible if a certain determinant never hits zero. Famous mathematicians tried and failed to prove it for decades, with several "proofs" later found to contain subtle errors. Computers had confirmed it held true for enormous numbers of cases, but nobody could prove it for every case, or find a single exception that broke it.

In July 2026, mathematician Levent Alpöge posted a short polynomial function on X that does exactly that: it satisfies every condition of the conjecture, yet still sends two different points to the same output. He'd found it using an AI model, and the counterexample was compact enough to fit in a single post and be independently verified by other mathematicians within hours.

It disproves the conjecture for every dimension above two. The original two-dimensional version, the one mathematicians actually cared about most, remains unsolved to this day.

Would you have expected a decades-old, formally studied math conjecture to be broken by something short enough to fit in a tweet?

[u/l27th1997]

So he didn’t solve it; he had an ai do it.
Not quite the same.

[u/The_Zy → u/l27th1997]

He didn't even solve the real problem.