Claude autonomously formalizes Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 days, 13M lines of Lean
Dr_Singularity · x · 2026-09-05
Anthropic reports the first complete computer-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Claude worked largely autonomously for 11 days, writing over 13 million lines of Lean and proving 29,500 intermediate theorems along the way.
Key context:
- FLT was conjectured around 1637 and first proven by Andrew Wiles in 1995 in a 129-page paper that took months to verify.
- A multi-year community formalization effort using the Lean proof assistant was kicked off in 2024 by Kevin Buzzard at Imperial College London.
- Anthropic researcher Tianyi Peng (Columbia University) set out to test whether Claude could make progress on formalizing FLT; the result went far beyond expectations, producing an end-to-end machine-verified proof.
The work is a landmark demonstration of AI's ability to autonomously handle high-intensity mathematical engineering, with implications for AI-assisted formalization in research mathematics.
Related event: Claude completes first formal proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in Lean(20 posts)→
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