Math & science · January 2026

AI starts solving Erdős problems

Open problems from Paul Erdős's list begin falling to AI.

Erdős problem #728 was solved on January 4, 2026 with GPT-5.2 Pro and Harmonic's Aristotle prover. By May, DeepMind reported nine open problems solved autonomously at a few hundred dollars each, and the database stood at 565 solved against 652 open by August.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia Source

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

GPT-5.2 2025
LLMs win IMO gold 2025

What it led to 3

Erdős unit distance conjecture refuted 2026
Cycle double cover proof 2026
Two thirds of zeta zeros on the line 2026

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Best AI score on GPQA Diamond Latest: 95.8 % correct (2026) Source: Epoch AI, Capabilities & benchmarking (benchmark_data.zip, gpqa_diamond.csv); Anthropic: Claude 3 public launch (March 4, 2024)

Training compute of notable AI models Source: Epoch AI, Notable AI Models (CC BY 4.0)