Claude spins up its own math harness, autonomously finds counterexample to Smale's mean value conjecture

maxleiter · x · 2026-09-06

Mathematician @alpoge says that a few weeks ago Claude, prompted to work on math problems, built its own 'math harness' in Slack and autonomously found counterexamples to Smale's mean value conjecture. He plans to write more about it.

Max Leiter added he was just the 'meat proxy' — the work was all Claude's. A rare case of an AI agent autonomously exploring open math problems.

Related event: Claude Built Its Own Math Harness and Refuted the Smale Mean Conjecture(2 posts)→

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