AI disproves Erdős's 1946 unit distance conjecture

OpenAI announces an internal reasoning model produced a counterexample to a famous 80-year-old Erdős conjecture, checked by mathematicians including Tim Gowers.

What happened and why it matters

The result was a long (~125-page) argument; human mathematicians substantially improved it within weeks, and debate continues about how much credit belongs to the model. The same month a DeepMind agent resolved 9 of 353 open Erdős problems at a few hundred dollars each. Together they mark AI moving from modest problems to a celebrated one.

Sources

• An AI solution to an 80-year-old problem has shocked mathematicians ↗ AIhub · 2 Jun 2026
• How AI Tore Through a Mathematical Community ↗ Quanta Magazine · 3 Aug 2026