About 25 awarded the Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Mathematics, warned of a possible “destructive effect” of artificial intelligence (IA) in the investigation in the discipline, a few days after the resolution of a complex problem by OpenAI.
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12/09/2026
by
Lusa
A chatGPT creator announced on Tuesday that one of his AI models had solved, in less than four days, a mathematical equation with more than a century of existence.
This announcement was overshadowed by the public statements of Australian mathematician Tristan Buckmaster, who questioned the similarities between his own works prior to the OpenAI project and those of the AI model.
Artificial intelligence “offers the potential to strengthen and accelerate the study and understanding of mathematics,” renowned researchers wrote on Friday in an open letter.
“Mathematics as a profession will have to adapt to these changes in various ways,” they explained.
For mathematicians, it is “the decisions of humans that control this technology” that will determine, “to a large extent”, whether they will be beneficial to discipline or whether they will have a destructive effect.
The 25 medal winners therefore ask the main AI companies to “respond urgently” to these issues.
Since last year, several of these companies have reported advances in the world of mathematics, but the resolution of the Navier-Stokes equation, announced on Tuesday, is the most remarkable.
It is part of the seven “Millennium Problems” selected in 2000 by the Clay Mathematics Institute research support organization, with a million dollar prize each.