AI is Rewriting Mathematics - Nofil’s Substack

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AI is Rewriting Mathematics<br>The beginning of the beginning.

Nofil<br>Aug 02, 2026

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At what point are people going to accept that AI is changing absolutely everything. Some people still call LLMs stochastic parrots and what not. This is total nonsense.<br>AI is rewriting mathematics. Just look at this timeline for the last 2 weeks:<br>Thanks for reading Nofil’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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July 20: Levent Alpöge announces he has proven the Jacobian conjecture is false. This problem was open for 87 years and was first proposed by Keller in 1939. According the greatest living mathematician, Terrence Tao, this was not a ‘brute force’ solution and required genuine creative insight [Link].<br>July 22: Dmitry Rybin announces the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture is proven false [Link]. This graph theory problem was open for ~30 years. His method was to literally ask ChatGPT for a counterexample, and then insist it continue its research and find one. No special prompting or context required. Read his chat so you can understand how absurd it is [Link].<br>July 23: Jared Zoneraich announces Graffiti Conjectures 39 & 40 are proven [Link]. They’ve been around for 40 years. Brandt's Regular Supergraph Problem was successfully refuted. This is from West's open problems list and has been around for ~20 years.<br>Also on July 23, mathematician Shouqiao Wang announces he solved 6 open Erdős problems in 5 days using GPT-5.6 Sol [Link].<br>July 24: Prabhanjan Ananth and Amit Sahai solved the unclonable encryption problem. This was one of the bigger open questions in quantum cryptography for the last 6 years, and was solved using the assistance of GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra.<br>July 25: Digvijay Bokey proves the Levit–Mandrescu conjecture is false. This graph theory problem was open for ~20 years [Link].<br>July 26: Three groups independently solved the same major problem in quantum information theory almost simultaneously [Link]. The problem was highlighted as one of “Five Open Problems in Quantum Information Theory” in 2022 and was open for 26 years. Two groups explicitly used GPT‑5.6 Sol using basic prompts; human researchers then verified it. The third group published first but did not disclose whether they used AI.<br>July 28: A man named Zhengqing proves a well known probability problem that had been open for 22 years using GPT‑5.6 Pro [Link]. It proved that when several independent random amounts are added together, there is always at least a 37% chance that the total stays reasonably close to its average.<br>July 30: Tencent’s Hyra research agent helped solve a 57-year-old problem in combinatorics [Link]. The problem asks how the number of distinct sums from a set of numbers compares with the number of distinct differences. Mathematicians had known the maximum possible gap since 1969 but did not know whether any sets could actually reach it. Hyra helped construct examples proving that the old limit is exact [Link].<br>Also July 30, Dominik Peters used GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra to settle a 25-year-old question about voting [Link]. It proved that combining three people’s ranked choices into the fairest possible final ranking is a fundamentally difficult computing problem, even though there are only three voters.<br>July 31: Philip Arathoon announces the Maxwell conjecture is false with a counterexample found by GPT-5.6 Sol [Link]. This was open for 153 years.<br>August 1

OpenAI announces their next major model, Astra, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity and theoretical computer science. The cost of generating proofs for all 10 of these combined was less than $2,000 at Sol API prices.

To give you an idea of just how absurd this is, every single one of these is a decades-old open problem, with some being considered as flagship problems of the entire field.<br>This isn’t AI assisting or solving one problem. This is a system conducting original research across entire fields and rewriting our understanding of them. If a single person produced all 10 of these proofs, it would be unprecedented; it would be like an entire generations worth of research across several fields being compressed into a single person’s output. Such a person would almost certainly be considered for a Fields medal. They would be heralded as a genius.<br>The fact that we now have AI systems that can do this is… so strange. I don’t blame the human mathematicians for crashing out like this.

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Source<br>Some Mathematicians are extremely excited because they believe that the solving of these problems opens up so many new problems and considerations. This has the potential to be a revolution in mathematics.<br>Is this the golden age of maths?

Source<br>I don’t know.<br>While mathematicians are excited [Link] [Link], to be clear, this does not mean AI is “solving math” [Link]. It has to be said that this isn’t AI finding entirely branches in math or...