Quoting Jake Boggan
OpenAI's AI reportedly proved Barnette's Conjecture, a decades-unsolved graph theory problem
“I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash.”
OpenAI's math repository lists Barnette's Conjecture (problem 180) as proven, a long-standing open problem in graph theory. A human mathematician who spent 24 years on the conjecture shares a raw emotional reaction on Hacker News, underscoring the human stakes when AI closes problems that defined careers. This is a notable data point in the ongoing story of AI-assisted formal mathematics and theorem proving.