Mathematician on OpenAI's Navier-Stokes push: picking the right question beats solving it
PTenigma · x · 2026-09-09
A mathematician argues the OpenAI-related Navier-Stokes story is genuinely historic and unusually dramatic.
- Navier-Stokes is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, each worth $1M — not benchmark questions, but open problems around which entire research programs grow.
- Over the past year, Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge advanced a program started by Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroza: pushing known blowup constructions from rough forcing toward smooth forcing, ultimately targeting incompressible Euler and Navier-Stokes.
- His core takeaway: mathematics may be entering an era where identifying the right question becomes more valuable than solving it — AI shifts the value from solving to problem selection.
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