AI just cracked maths problems that stumped people for decades — explained

If you saw headlines about AI 'solving maths problems' in May and weren't sure what to make of them — here's the plain-English version, with the hype dialled out.

OpenAI said one of its reasoning models disproved an idea about geometry first suggested by the mathematician Paul Erdős back in 1946 — showing the long-assumed 'best' arrangement of points wasn't actually best. Google DeepMind then said its system, AlphaProof Nexus, solved nine other long-open Erdős problems, two of which had been unsolved for 56 years.

Here's the clever bit. AI can sound confident and still be wrong, so Google's system pairs the AI with a proof checker called Lean — software that refuses to accept a proof unless every single step is logically airtight. That's the difference between 'an AI said so' and 'the maths checks out'.