Erdos Problem 1196: Can AI now solve maths that no human can?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 16 May 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
It’s said that AI could soon be coming for the jobs of artists, lawyers, and software engineers. But it might now also be threatening a role at the height of academia – are pure mathematicians safe? Last month, a Stanford mathematician woke up to an email, claiming to have the solution to a problem he'd been working on for seven years - a 60-year-old conundrum known as "Erdos Problem 1196". The answer had been generated in just 80 minutes - by ChatGPT. Since the end of last year, AI has been providing solutions to a number of novel maths problems, but Problem 1196 is the first to raise eyebrows within the mathematical community. In this episode, we talk to the mathematicians who've worked on Problem 1196 and find out what the rise of AI could mean for the future of their field. CONTRIBUTORS: Katie Steckles, Mathematician and communicator Jared Duker Lichtman, Szegő Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University Liam Price, amateur mathematician Credits:
Presenter: Charlotte McDonald Producer: Josh McMinn Series producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Dave O'Neill Editor: Richard Vadon
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast, with a programme that looks at the numbers in the news, in life, and in 50-year-old maths puzzles. |
| 0:15.2 | I'm Charlotte MacDonald. |
| 0:18.5 | Ever since AI started creeping into our lives, people in certain professions have been worrying that it's come to steal their jobs. Software coders, insurance analysts, and junior lawyers are all watching AI unfold with understandable trepidation. |
| 0:34.9 | But recent events mean we might need to spare a thought for the select |
| 0:38.7 | view whose job sits at the very pinnacle of academia, the brave souls who study pure |
| 0:45.6 | mathematics. For hundreds of years, mathematicians have been straining their gigantic brains |
| 0:51.5 | against fiendish math problems that no one has yet been able to figure out. |
| 0:56.0 | They ponder them, debate them, publish papers on them, solving them can be a life's work. |
| 1:04.0 | Then, on the 13th of April this year, AI appeared to solve a mathematical problem that has so far eluded mere human thinkers known as Erdosch Problem 1196. |
| 1:15.6 | Experts in the field were surprised, to say the least. |
| 1:19.6 | But what is this problem? Has AI really solved it? |
| 1:22.6 | And what does it mean for mathematics if it has? |
| 1:31.0 | Unsolved maths problems have a sudden mystique. |
| 1:34.2 | The one you might have heard of is Fermat's last theorem, |
| 1:38.2 | which was discovered in a handwritten note on the edge of a page in a textbook, |
| 1:40.4 | written by the 17th century mathematician. |
| 1:44.0 | He'd written, I have a solution, but it's too big to fit in the margin. |
| 1:49.2 | That's mathematician Katie Steckles, and it wasn't solved until 1994. |
| 1:54.9 | It was several hundred years before we actually got a resolution to this, and the mathematician that proved it was using areas of maths that didn't even exist in Fermat's time. |
| 1:59.6 | And why you might have only heard of one, there are plenty more, |
| 2:02.7 | with all kinds of strange names, the Collatz conjecture, the Riemann hypothesis. |
| 2:07.8 | Oh, there's loads, and we're finding more every day. |
... |
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