OpenAI has certainly caught the attention of the math world by announcing that it had solved 10 open math problems using Astra, its yet-unrelased model, and mathematicians have had all kinds of reactions to the news.
Jay Cummings, who is a math professor at CSU Sacramento and has written several books on math, said the result was “incredible” and said that these were problems he had himself thought about. “As far as AI math breakthroughs go, these problems feel much closer to being real-world applicable. Makes me wonder if they are trying to move in that direction,” he said.
Henry Yuen, who is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, said he had a “complicated mix of feelings” about the result. “Wow. I mean, Erdos problems are cool (I genuinely mean that), I didn’t know about the Jacobian conjecture before it got disproved. But this newest batch from OpenAI hits home in a way the previous announcements did not,” he said. “And then — the kicker — something that I personally spent a couple years on in grad school, leading to some of my proudest work: quantum parallel repetition theorems,” he added.
Yuen however said that the AI-generated proofs didn’t focus sufficiently on the more complex parts. “I am disappointed by the writeup of this proof. It writes in a way that’s characteristic of a lot of ChatGPT-generated proofs, in which it elaborates at length on “boilerplate” setup, but then nonchalantly introduces what I consider to be the technical crux of the result,” he said. But he however said he was in “awe”, and excited to see what other things AI could teach mathematics.
Georgi Ivanov, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in math in 2025, called the results an “order of magnitude jump”, and that we were entering a new age in Mathematics.
6-time Kaggle grandmaster Jean-François Puget, who works on Machine Learning at NVIDIA, said that the result would change how people selected their PhD topics. “If I were to start a PhD now I’d probably look for something with a large physical world component, wet lab, physics experimental lab, IT hardware, or robotics, rather than something purely symbolic (e.g. maths), CS. The latter are being swallowed by LLMs at a rapid pace,” he said.
Eric Weinstein said that while the work being done by OpenAI in math was “amazing”, he felt that it wasn’t yet at the level of top humans. “AI has a style that is weirdly being taken to be universal (which it isnt). Hence the claim that Mathematians and Physicists are nearly obsolete. Ahem: there is no *public* indication that this is REMOTELY true,” he said.
John Ennis, who has a PhD in Math, called the results “incredibly exciting” but said that human mathematicians wouldn’t go extinct. “The job of mathematician is going to change a lot, but the idea that AI is going to make human mathematicians irrelevant is just not correct Each one of these solutions is going to open up a large number of new problems, plus, of course somebody needs to understand what these proofs actually imply,” he said.
Daniel Litt, who is an Assistant professor (of mathematics) at the University of Toronto. said that the results were a “big deal” and “pretty exciting stuff”.
Jared Duker Lichtman, who is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford, said the result was impressive but not entirely surprising. “Impressive for sure, but not surprising. If you found this news surprising, pause and reflect. Seek out those who did not. You’ll be less disoriented for what’s next,” he said.
Bharath Ramsundar, who has a PhD in CS from Stanford, the new proofs would miss part of the reason people do math. “think math for many is a sort of spiritual discipline, say like meditating or chanting prayers in some religious traditions. A robot that can say chant the Vedas a thousand times faster than a human isn’t terribly useful. Nor would you think of that robot as a repository of wisdom,” he said.
And Scott Armstrong, who is a Math professor at NYU, perhaps summed it up best. “my twitter feed is now just AI for math, and there are essentially just two types of comments: (A) those gleefully unleashing pent-up resentment toward mathematics and mathematicians (i.e. written by ppl who did not enjoy undergraduate analysis and (B) mathematicians who have their entire self worth and reason for existing tied to their cleverness, who are now in despair. Hey everybody we’re just a bunch of stupid apes trying to comprehend the universe. It is cool if we can build machines to accelerate our understanding. Math is not about you, me, or our egos. Nobody needs to jump out the window, chill out,” he said.