Kevin Hartnett

That's my goal.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

So mathematicians, there are just a lot of unsolved math problems in the world.

And just because a math problem is unsolved and has been around for decades and was dreamed up by a famous mathematician does not make it an important problem.

Like an important problem is one the field kind of in its like collective wisdom determines either like the answer to the problem really will change how we view math or more significantly, the methods we will need to develop to solve that problem are just going to remake the field.

It's going to create important new math.

These Erudite problems were just not viewed that way.

They're kind of like sophisticated riddles in a way.

It is like the Wordle of math.

I think that's a fair statement.

And so anyway, mathematicians didn't spend a lot of time looking at them.

I think the conventional wisdom was these Erdos problems are like toy problems, not serious problems.

It's not true about all of them.

And about a month ago, OpenAI came out with this big new result.

They've solved what many people think of as one of the most important Erdos problems, this thing called the unit distance conjecture.

What was important about the unit distance problem is it was a problem that a lot of people had looked at.

So you could just say no humans have really tried to solve this.

People have looked at it, they hadn't solved it.

The methods underneath it were very sophisticated and surprising.