Cal Newport

It was the star of today's show.

If you haven't read this book, you need to because I talk about it all the time.

It's the source language.

You buy that book and you have it.

All right, that's it.

See you next week.

And as always, stay deep.

Last week, OpenAI published a press release titled, An OpenAI Model Has Disproved a Central Conjecture in Discrete Geometry.

They were talking specifically about the planar unit distance problem, which was first posed by Paul Erdos in 1946.

Now this is actually a pretty simple problem to state.

It basically says,

What is the maximum number of pairs of points in a set of endpoints in a flat plane that can be exactly one unit of distance apart?

Now, back in the 1940s, Erdos proposed an answer to this question.

He couldn't prove it, but he thought he knew what the answer was.

Last week, OpenAI essentially announced that they had used an LLM to prove that Erdos' proposed answer was, in fact, incorrect.

The OpenAI press release was accompanied by a video that featured dramatic music and a group of researchers writing earnestly on a comically small blackboard as they explained why this was a big deal.

Here, let's play a clip of that video.

The mainstream press soon picked up on this story with enthusiasm.

Here's the new scientist headline.

Mathematicians stunned by AI's biggest breakthrough in mathematics.