The Simons Foundation announced a partnership with Anthropic and OpenAI committing $15 million in combined funding and resources to help mathematicians adapt to AI's growing role in research. The foundation will manage the money, including an open call for proposals, funding workshops and initiatives to evaluate AI-assisted results, train researchers on new tools, and develop shared standards. Anthropic and OpenAI will also supply AI tools and computing resources to foundation-supported researchers in mathematics and basic science.
simonsfoundation.org
· 2026-10-15
An amateur mathematician spent a month using a frontier AI model to attempt a formal Lean proof of John Conway's refinement conjecture about omnific integers in surreal number theory, a problem posed 50 years ago. The proof reportedly passed mechanical verification through the Palomar registry, and some Lean and field experts said the statement appears correct, though full independent mathematical verification is still pending.
overreacted.io
· 2026-09-18
Anthropic researcher Tianyi Peng tested whether the Claude AI model could formalize Fermat's Last Theorem in the Lean proof assistant, and over 11 days of largely autonomous work, Claude generated an end-to-end, machine-checked proof. The system wrote roughly 13 million lines of Lean code and proved about 29,500 intermediate theorems, building on decades of prior work including Andrew Wiles's 1995 proof and a community formalization effort led by Kevin Buzzard since 2024.
anthropic.com
· 2026-09-04
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