🤯 GPT-5.6 Sol helps break a 150-year-old math conjecture

🤯 GPT-5.6 Sol helps break a 150-year-old math conjecture For nearly 150 years, mathematicians believed a famous idea proposed by physicist James Clerk Maxwell was true. Not anymore. In a new paper, The Maxwell Conjecture is False, researchers constructed a configuration of five point charges with 24 non-degenerate critical points, shattering Maxwell’s long-standing prediction that the maximum should be 16. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol provided the key idea that led the team to the breakthrough. The researchers emphasized that the AI didn’t produce the proof itself. Instead, GPT-5.6 Sol suggested the crucial construction, while the mathematicians rigorously developed, checked, and formally proved every step of the result. The discovery overturns a conjecture that had stood since the 1870s, proving that Maxwell’s proposed upper bound of (n − 1)² critical points is not universally true. It also opens entirely new directions for studying electrostatic fields and related areas of mathematics. The authors even acknowledged the AI’s contribution in the paper: “We are grateful to OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol for suggesting the construction that eventually led to our counterexample.” Source. @aipost 🏴