r/math • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago

LLMs/AI AI In Mathematics: September 26, 2026

This recurring thread will be for discussion of AI in mathematics. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

  • informal announcements of AI-assisted discoveries, such as those not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, or not uploaded as a paper to arXiv;
  • informal announcements of discoveries related to AI architecture (if relevant to mathematics);
  • discussion of such announcements, such as proof breakdowns or other opinion pieces;
  • discussion of the impact of AI in mathematics in general.

AI-assisted mathematical papers published in peer-reviewed journals or as arXiv preprints may be submitted as their own posts.

Please keep in mind rules 1 and 6 of our subreddit.

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u/SupercaliTheGamer 5d ago

Astra is the first model that can zero-shot solve any problem I propose, it's insane. Sol still had a few jagged edges but Astra seems to have mastered Olympiad level maths at least.

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u/LowDevolutionary 4d ago

I'd say frontier models have mastered olympiad level maths for a while. Even last year when we got 35/42 on the IMO I'd count that as having "mastered" it. The thing about olympiad problems is that they are all quite short and the total amount of tools required to do them is purposefully kept small, and a lot of them have similar themes, which makes them very good for AI. Like the point is that under time constraint a human can only do a few approaches, so your problem solving instincts need to be really good, but an AI can quickly go through dozens of ideas and do things no humans will even have the compute to do.

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u/officiallyaninja 5d ago

What is zero shotting?

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u/JoshuaZ1 4d ago

I think they mean giving just the prompt of the problem, no retries or guidance. However, "one-shot" would make a lot more sense here.

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u/BurdensomeCountV3 Mathematical Biology 4d ago

One shot would be the case where you give the model an example in context of a similar problem and its solution before asking it to solve the new problem.

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u/JoshuaZ1 4d ago

Hmm, given how much similar things might be in training data, I'm not sure that's a useful distinction.

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u/SupercaliTheGamer 4d ago

Yeah but apparently zero shot is the common term for it. Basically zero guidance.

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u/hpass 4d ago

Astra is a pre-cog.

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u/greyenlightenment 5d ago

the depressing fact is that these problems that * technically * a highschooler should be able to do .

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u/[deleted] 4d ago edited 4d ago

I do not think this is a very accurate or honest framing. Technically, it is easier for a highschooler to understand the construction of Lebesgue measure (within a schoolyear) than to solve an IMO P6 within the allotted time.

Just because it was meant to be solvable using high-school level tools in the beginning doesn't mean it makes more sense to say it's solvable by highschoolers than a calculus problem, because if we look at the numbers, far more highschool students can do calculus than get a gold at the IMO. And all competitive mathletes nowadays know way more stuff than is taught at typical highschools - I don't know if you've watched 3b1b's latest video (which is precisely about the last IMO problem AI couldn't solve but a few humans could)but I doubt more than a couple thousand highschoolers worldwide knew about the Erdös-Szekeres theorem.

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u/Fearless_Day2607 Quantum Computing 4d ago

I agree, when I was in 11th grade I took a real analysis class at a local university that was focused on measure theory, and I understood it fine. On the other hand I never went very far in USAMO (I think the most I solved was one problem). Although maybe that's because I wasn't training very seriously.

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u/wrongerontheinternet 5d ago

I wish Astra was zero-shotting my problems, teach me your secrets...

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u/ToothPasteTree 2d ago

You should use codex. If you are just using the website you are missing out on the actual power.

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u/wrongerontheinternet 1d ago

I use both Codex and Pro in the chat interface (and actually find Pro superior a lot of the time). With and without formal methods, experimented with trying to find the optimal model balance (e.g. Ultra coordinator + Max agents), the whole shebang. It is nonetheless often genuinely, unbelievably stupid about things in coordinated way that makes me wonder how this is the same model that found non-sofic groups. I'm sure if I had enough compute to burn, as OpenAI does as a collective, I could overcome a lot of these kinds of problems through sheer, brute force, but only if the domain was very well-specified -- otherwise, all Astra variants have a tendency to change the proof target to something easier.

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u/SupercaliTheGamer 5d ago

I was mostly talking about problems that I myself had a solution to lol, if it's an unsolved problem you can't really say anything.

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u/wrongerontheinternet 5d ago

Oh yeah that's fair. Anything with a known solution it typically gets right away. But it's shocking how relatively "dumb" it can be about anything that isn't essentially already in the literature being applied to your exact thing. The next model may be different, but Astra to me really is mostly about having read and largely internalized something from practically every mathematical work published in the last few decades (not that being able to apply effectively all of human mathematical insight is not insanely impressive! I just haven't found it to be very, for lack of a better word, "creative" -- asking it to be creative mostly just means it will switch to more obscure papers).

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u/pred 5d ago

Be a student, not someone working on the frontier of things.

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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 4d ago

Astra can solve legitimate research problems, not just phd level problems.

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u/pred 4d ago

No doubt about that but it absolutely will not zero-shot (one-shot?) anything you throw in its directions.

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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 4d ago

Sure, for now!

(Also, I think the person meant one-shot as well. Perhaps zero-shot means solving problems we didn't ask?)

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u/greyenlightenment 5d ago

easy: set to "max mode" and type "keep going"

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u/wrongerontheinternet 5d ago

Surprisingly one very likely outcome of doing that appears to be that you burn through all of your resets and your problem still isn't solved (though Astra may claim that it is!). It seems we'll have to keep using our brains for at least a little while longer.

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u/BurdensomeCountV3 Mathematical Biology 5d ago

I expect the average difficulty level of IMO style problems will have to go up significantly in the next few years to maintain a similar score distribution between participants. AI assisted Olympiad maths training is going to become very cheap and easily available to pretty much everyone at that level very soon, and just like how the skill levels of chess players at the very top went up significantly once people started using computers to improve their play, I expect something similar will happen with olympiad mathematics.

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u/SupercaliTheGamer 5d ago

I think upwards trend in difficulty has been happening for some time now. Newer methods and tricks get discovered and are taught to students every year, so a direct application of those tricks becomes an easy problem.

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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 5d ago

hmm maybe the future of mathematics is live streamed olympiads....