Machines can crunch numbers, but humans still need to understand them

Published October 13, 2026 4:00pm ET



On Tuesday, OpenAI published more than 370 mathematical results spanning algebra, theoretical computer science, and mathematical logic. Most came from a single prompt and about three hours of computing time. “If a human did this, it would be an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked,” wrote Alex Kontorovich, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University.

There’s been a rapid pace of AI-led mathematical breakthroughs in recent months. OpenAI announced last month that after 88 hours of work, its AI had cracked the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness puzzle, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems that has baffled mathematicians for almost a century. On the same day, Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, which maps the predicted molecular effects of all 9 billion possible single-letter changes to human DNA.

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