Two High School Students Crack a Problem That Stumped a Fields Medalist
Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students
Aayush Bathija and Prince Rohatgi, high schoolers at Oak Park High School, guided by UCLA postdoc Daniel Soskin, posted a 75-page paper on arXiv that extends the theory of Lorentzian polynomials—pioneered by Fields Medalist June Huh—to arbitrary degrees. Using AI assistants Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol for computation and proof ideas, they determined which coefficient ratios have universal upper bounds. The work arrives just after 25 Fields Medalists warned about AI's threat to mathematical rigor.
AI has entered the exploration phase, but rigorous verification remains the prerequisite for valid results.
- no-name-here
Real title includes:
> Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students with AI
My title recommendation: Fields Medalist Problem Solved With AI
They used AI for “computation, proof idea generation, and editing assistance”.
It’s a bit odd how they list the AIs used - “Claude Opus 5, Anthropic and ChatGPT Sol5.6 were used for calculations, proof ideas, and
editorial assistance.”
- sp-ti-en-ma-in
paper:
Title: BOUNDED RATIOS FOR LORENTZIAN POLYNOMIALS
- htrp
the fact that you have to encourage these models and tell them that they can solve these problems and warm up on easier problems seems to indicate that there's something to AI pairing above and beyond prompt
- dataflow
What I'm curious about is how far they would've gotten without the postdoc.
- Aargau
Working backwards from the Navier-Stokes solution, I was able to walk Astra through the path used to solve it. It took some formulation, starting with the problem, then challenging it to look closer at the specific path, and iterating when it got stuck, it was able to reach the solution.