A Grothendieck joke meets an AI math debate

teortaxesTex · x · 2026-07-20

A short jab at the idea that Grothendieck would now side with machines.
The attached thread discusses an apparent AI-assisted breakthrough in algebraic geometry: a postdoc and another researcher had spent years brute-forcing candidate counterexamples to the Jacobian Conjecture, while a later system reportedly found one in degree 7.
Commenters debate whether the result is being oversold as a marketing stunt, whether the search space was constrained, and how much actual LLM involvement there was.
One reply notes earlier work that put a lower bound of about 100 for counterexamples in that framework, later improved to 108 in a cited arXiv paper.

More from Fun