I've recently got in on the act of getting AI to solve open problems in mathematics. More precisely, I gave some questions asked by Melvyn Nathanson to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, to which I have been given access, and it answered them. 🧵
I write about this in more detail in a blog post with a guest contribution from Isaac Rajagopal, a student at MIT on whose work ChatGPT built, who gives his assessment of the level of mathematical ability displayed by the model.
gowers.wordpress.com/2026/05/08/a-r…
But the tl;dr version is that the model proved a result that in my assessment would have made a perfectly reasonable chapter in a PhD thesis. It did this in a total of a couple of hours, with a few prompts from me that contained no mathematical input whatsoever.
All I did was say things like, "Yes, it would be great if you could explore that idea and see whether you can get it to work," or "Could you rewrite that argument as a LaTeX file in the style of a standard mathematical preprint?"
Of course, this raises all sorts of questions about what is going to happen to mathematical research, with the impact on PhD students being particularly urgent. I give a few thoughts on this in the blog post, but I don't have anything like complete answers.
But if AI mathematics continues to progress at anything like its current rate -- which is what I expect to happen -- then we will face a crisis very soon, and mathematics departments, who owe a duty of care to their students, should be urgently preparing for it.
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