AI’s solution to 87-year-old riddle takes mathematicians by surprise
A mathematician has cracked an 87-year-old conundrum with the help of AI and announced the solution unceremoniously in a tweet. The finding is the most difficult mathematical problem yet solved by AI, say experts.
Levent Alpöge at Harvard University wrote on X on 19 July that the Jacobian conjecture – which academics have spent decades trying to prove was true – is actually false, giving a tiny, 216-character counterexample as proof.
The Jacobian conjecture – which suggests that a certain type of mathematical function would also work in reverse – was formally set out by Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1939. It was also on an influential list of 18 fiendishly difficult problems for mathematicians to tackle in the 21st century drawn up by Stephen Smale in 1998.
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