Mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London is training computers how to prove one of the most famous problems in math history: Fermat’s last theorem. Resolving the problem isn’t the point.

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. In 1997, Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM, did the unexpected: it defeated chess ...

The verdict, it seems, is in: artificial intelligence is not about to replace mathematicians. That is the immediate takeaway from the “First Proof” challenge—perhaps the most robust test yet of the ...

The tipping point came in the summer of 2025. That July, several artificial intelligence models solved five out of six problems at the International Mathematical Olympiad, an annual challenge for some ...