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  • Hacker News
  • This looks like a graduate-level proof. Did these high school students really understand what they were doing? I'd like to see what they have to say.

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.05341

    by esafak
  • i wonder if anyone is going to read that.
    by robotpepi
  • Great to see high school students getting attention on this.
    by Founderarcstone
  • Not peer reviewed. UCLA seems to be full of AI boosters who perform circus tricks.
    by 1299348
  • Haven't you heard? Fields Medalists believe it only counts when they do the solving - not the unwashed.
    by thrill
  • Great short term achievement but humanity is better served by these kids doing it without AI. The ideas have to come from the next generation (eg would we be worried if a 5 year old wrote the great American novel with AI or not?)
    by catpower
  • AI is not going away so people will have to get used to it just like they will have to get used to it in software engineering. The alternative is being less productive than people who are happy to use AI to write software & do mathematical research.
    by measurablefunc
  • I think it's more like how anyone learning to play chess is going to use chess engines, but you can't learn to play by always asking the chess engine for the answer.

    I expect that all mathematicians are going to be working with power tools, so they might as well learn about that. They will still need to do math exercises by hand to learn the material.

    by skybrian
  • I sort of wonder if effectively using AI to solve math problems is a skill in its own right, distinct from traditional mathematical skills. I don’t just mean “prompt engineering” either. More so figuring out how to combine agents with other tools and approaches in an effective way.
    by Xcelerate
  • IMO, it _currently_ requires a lot of skill because it will frequently take wrong turns and dead ends and needs suggestions and steering to get there. You do need to understand what it is doing at least a little bit and to understand the general landscape of the problem, and to at least have a sense of whether and why the problem is tractable at all.
    by empath75
  • If it is a skill, it's something that can be learned by both humans and LLMs.
    by stabbles
  • You still have to be able to verify the solution to say that it's solved, so I'd say no.
    by breezybottom
  • Agree this is a broad statement for any use of AI for any purpose. Open ended prompts / requests are bound to lead to misleading results, hallucinated responses, waste of tokens, etc
    by firesteelrain
  • Working backwards from the Navier-Stokes solution, I was able to walk Astra through the path used to solve it. It took some formulation, starting with the problem, then challenging it to look closer at the specific path, and iterating when it got stuck, it was able to reach the solution.
    by Aargau
  • the fact that you have to encourage these models and tell them that they can solve these problems and warm up on easier problems seems to indicate that there's something to AI pairing above and beyond prompt
    by htrp
  • One way they improved the hallucination problem was basically training the models to refuse to do or say something if they are not very sure they can do it. As a side effect, they refuse to work on problems they know are extremely hard.
    by dist-epoch
  • Yeah it s because they have a strong prior on unsolved problems being unsolvable.

    Once the idea of AI routinely solving conjectures enters the training data this encouragement will disappear like 2023-era prompt engineering did.

    by bananaflag
  • They are relying on training data of humans talking about how hard these problems are. Same way an un-reminded Claude gives estimates for work that are as if a human is doing it by hand, but then will drop them by 20x if you remind them it’s going to do the work.
    by asolove
  • What I'm curious about is how far they would've gotten without the postdoc.
    by dataflow
  • This is a common pattern ahead of admissions season. Now admissions are mostly done I suppose.
    by srean
  • paper:

    Title: BOUNDED RATIOS FOR LORENTZIAN POLYNOMIALS

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.05341

    by sp-ti-en-ma-in
  • If you replace "pdf" with "abs" the link sends you to the arXiv landing site.
    by emil-lp
  • Real title includes:

    > Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students with AI

    My title recommendation: Fields Medalist Problem Solved With AI

    They used AI for “computation, proof idea generation, and editing assistance”.

    It’s a bit odd how they list the AIs used - “Claude Opus 5, Anthropic and ChatGPT Sol5.6 were used for calculations, proof ideas, and editorial assistance.”

    by no-name-here
  • It means that the solution is merely an interpolation of existing work and not fundamentally innovative as AI can only regurgitate, never creating something new.
    by kelseyfrog
  • note HEAVILY

    > The students heavily utilized AI assistants, specifically Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, for computational exploration, proof idea generation, and editing.

    this is a bit like Enhanced Olympics(https://www.enhanced.com), except that you have someone else compete for you.

    My issue is that it makes it hard to distinguish real insight/work etc. from effectively null one.

    An old instance of the same issue was with what was called "script kiddie" back in the 90-00s

    by random3