The summer Math fell to the machines...
AI solved multiple decades-old open math conjectures this summer, alarming top mathematicians worldwide.
“Couldn't believe it. I I had trouble sleeping for the first couple of nights I was out.”
In summer 2026, AI systems solved several major open mathematical problems including disproving the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture (on Smale's hardest 21st-century problems list) and a 30-year graph theory conjecture solved in just 58 words of prompting. The wave of breakthroughs prompted Terence Tao to warn of a 'crisis in the foundations of mathematical values and practices' at the International Congress of Mathematicians, and 16 researchers across 15 universities issued the Leiden Declaration calling for guardrails on AI in math research. This signals AI has crossed from competitive-math novelty into genuine research-frontier capability, with implications for how scientific knowledge gets produced and validated.