“Math Is Cooked.” A Physicist Said It Twice. Mathematicians Are Still Arguing About It.

An OpenAI model just disproved an 80-year-old conjecture. Then a Princeton mathematician beat it by a factor of a billion in a single weekend. Here’s what actually happened and means for anyone.

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A few weeks ago, MIT physicist Alexander Wissner-Gross said something blunt enough to repeat twice in the same breath: math, in his words, is finished. He wasn’t alone in thinking it. But the reaction that followed split the mathematics world into two camps so sharply that sixteen mathematicians from fifteen universitie…