Math & science · May 2026

Erdős unit distance conjecture refuted

An AI model overturns an 80-year-old Erdős conjecture.

An OpenAI model constructed point sets with at least n^(1+ε) unit distances, refuting Erdős's 1946 conjecture that the count grows as n^(1+o(1)). A group of mathematicians including Noga Alon and Timothy Gowers verified and wrote up the result the same day.

See it in the living treeWikipediaSource