Claude autonomously produces first computer-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 days
hornof · x · 2026-09-05
Anthropic announced the first complete computer-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem: Claude worked largely autonomously for 11 days, writing the proof in Lean — 13 million lines of code and 29,500 intermediate theorems along the way.
Context:
- FLT was posed in 1637; the only prior proof (Wiles, 1995) ran 129 pages and took months to verify
- Kevin Buzzard kicked off a multi-year community formalization effort in Lean starting 2024 at Imperial College London
- Anthropic researcher Tianyi Peng set out to test whether Claude could make progress on the formalization; it instead finished it end-to-end
Buzzard called it an extraordinary autoformalization achievement — a landmark case of AI autonomously completing top-tier mathematical research.
Related event: Claude Produces First Formalized Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 Days(52 posts)→
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