AI has now disproved an 87-year-old conjecture by finding a counterexample humans never spotted.

The conjecture asks a question about polynomial maps between sets of variables. Given the outputs, can you always recover the single input behind them? A German mathematician posed it in 1939, and it remained unresolved since.

Levent Alpöge, working at Anthropic, showed the answer is no.
The proof was already verified in Lean, the checking language for Math.

The human edge is slowly disappearing in Math.

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fortune .com/2026/07/21/ai-solves-jacobian-conjecture-levant-alpoge-claude-fable-5/