Two Years of Math vs 88 Hours of AI: Spanish Mathematicians Say 'Without Our Idea, OpenAI Wouldn't Have Solved It'
stevenstrogatz · x · 2026-09-10
EL PAÍS reports that a conjecture mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa had worked on for years was solved by an OpenAI model in roughly 88 hours, leaving Córdoba in shock as emails flooded in before he even saw the announcement.
- The pair insists "without our idea, AI wouldn't have solved it" — the model built on their method, extending years of incremental progress.
- Córdoba admits they may never have gotten there without AI: "it could have taken another year, two — or never."
- Buckmaster's team publicly stated it "made no mathematical contribution whatsoever," merely implementing the Spaniards' method with AI, and called for mathematics' highest recognition to go to Martínez-Zoroa.
- The report references OpenAI's €15 million involvement; Córdoba says he is "happy" mathematicians are recognizing his and Luis's work.
A landmark case in human-AI mathematical collaboration — and a brewing credit dispute.
Related event: AI goes from garbage to cracking years-old conjecture in 88 hours(2 posts)→
More from Research
- Minqi Jiang: AI won't replace mathematicians, it's a new kind of telescope — MinqiJiang · 2026-09-10
- Recirculation paper: leaking late-layer activations boosts frozen Gemma3's GSM8k accuracy by 21% — s_scardapane · 2026-09-10
- Paper unveils preliminary Agent Swarm RL recipe; V4.1 teams hit 30% on ProgramBench — inductionheads · 2026-09-10
- OpenAegis doubles security-agent pass rate to 58.1% via CyberFactory trajectories — jiqizhixin · 2026-09-10
- Semantic bottleneck enables non-invasive sentence decoding from MEG signals — pnpl · 2026-09-10
- Gen2Balance at ECCV 2026: generative videos fill long-tailed action datasets to reach SOTA — dimadamen · 2026-09-10