On Sunday afternoon, while the rest of the world’s eyes were glued to the World Cup final, an AI model resolved a problem that had tortured mathematicians since 1939.
By the time Kevin Buzzard woke up in London the next morning, the result had been verified. By lunch, it was all his peers at the Imperial College London’s pure mathematics department could talk about; at the time of writing, Anthropic employee Levant Alpöge’s post announcing the result has drawn more than 20 million views on X.
