"From his home in southwest England, Price got the popular artificial-intelligence tool to solve what is known as Erdős problem #1196, one of more than 1,000 puzzles that Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős (1913-1996) collected throughout his life. Unlike other AI-generated solutions to mathematical problems, this one used a strategy that surprised specialists (B. Alexeev et al. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/q6p7; 2026)."
"Posting on the social-media site X, mathematician Jared Duker Lichtman at Stanford University in California drew an analogy with chess. It was, he wrote, as if AI had discovered an opening no one had thought of before because of "human aesthetics and convention"."
"Researchers in academia and at AI companies have been making a major push to see how far the systems can go. Computers are now contributing not just brute-force calculations, but also the type of logically sound reasoning that has been the province of mathematicians since Euclid more than 2,300 years ago."
"In many cases, advances have come from systems that are based on general-purpose large language models (LLMs), such as GPT, Gemini and Claude, without any special mathematical training. And - as with many areas of AI - the progress has been astoundingly fast. The systems are still mostly rehashing techniques they absorbed from the existing literature, and that was the case with some of the solutions to other Erdős problems that Price first achieved with his collaborator, Kevin Barreto, a mathematics undergraduate student at Cambridge University, UK."
Liam Price, without formal mathematics training or university attendance, used ChatGPT to solve Erdős problem #1196. The approach surprised specialists because it relied on a strategy that appeared novel rather than a straightforward reuse of known methods. The result was compared to discovering a new chess opening shaped by human conventions. The achievement fits a broader pattern of rapid AI progress in mathematics, where systems increasingly contribute reasoning steps rather than only calculations. Many advances come from general-purpose large language models such as GPT, Gemini, and Claude, often without specialized mathematical training. Some outputs still largely reflect existing literature, but mathematicians are beginning to see signs of original thinking in certain solutions.
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