AI Just Solved a 350-Year-Old Math Problem By Writing the Longest Proof Ever
Anthropic says Claude produced the first computer-checkable formal proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, completing it in 11 days with heavy parallelization and little human guidance. The result is a 13-million-line Lean proof that a computer can verify step by step, translating Andrew Wiles’s 1995 proof into formal logic. Claude generated over 30,000 supporting theorems and used a coordination tool, Prove2Me, after early agents lost track of prior work. This does not discover new mathematics; it formalizes an already accepted proof, making it easier to verify and reducing human error. Kevin Buzzard reviewed the output and said it proves the theorem from standard axioms. The significance is scalability: AI may help mathematicians manage the growing burden of checking long, complex proofs.
