A 23-Year-Old Amateur Made ChatGPT Crack a 60-Year Math Problem in 80 Minutes
A 23-Year-Old Amateur Made ChatGPT Crack a 60-Year Math Problem in 80 Minutesno phd. no fancy job. just a $200 chatbot subscription and the audacity to paste a “impossible” question into the box.
Liam Price, 23, no advanced math degree, fed an open Erdős problem to GPT-5.4 Pro on a random Monday. It spat out a fresh proof in 80 minutes — using a trick pro mathematicians never thought to apply here.
Full story broke on Scientific American. These are problems named after Paul Erdős — the legendary math wizard who used to hand out CASH to anyone who solved them. Some are still sitting unsolved on a public website right now.
🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary
| Big Word | What It Actually Means |
|---|---|
| Erdős problem | A famous unsolved math puzzle left behind by a genius named Paul Erdős. There’s a whole public list of them. |
| Open problem | A question nobody on Earth has answered yet. Not “hard homework” — literally undefeated. |
| Proof | The receipts. Math doesn’t accept “trust me bro” — you have to show every step is airtight. |
| GPT-5.4 Pro | The heavy-duty brain inside a paid ChatGPT plan. Thinks longer, digs deeper than the free one. |
| “Vibe maths” | Term the internet coined: poke an AI with a real problem and vibe your way to a real answer with no formal training. |
| Bounty | Cash reward attached to solving a specific problem. Yes, math has bounties. No, most people don’t know. |
📖 How some broke dude embarrassed the entire math world
Liam Price wasn’t trying to make history. He didn’t even know the problem was 60 years old and had bodied world-class mathematicians. He was just bored, copy-pasting problems off the Erdős problems site into ChatGPT to see what would happen.
- He’s 23, ChatGPT Pro subscriber, no advanced math background.
- GPT-5.4 Pro solved it from a single prompt in about 80 minutes.
- The wild part: the AI reached for a formula that lives in a totally different corner of math and nobody had thought to point it at this puzzle.
- He looped in his buddy Kevin Barreto, a 2nd-year undergrad at Cambridge, to check it. The two basically kicked off the whole “AI-for-Erdős” craze.
Two dudes. A chatbot. A problem older than their parents. Cooked in under two hours.
📊 The receipts
| Thing | Number |
|---|---|
| Age of the problem | ~60 years |
| Time AI took | ~80 minutes |
| Prompts needed | 1 |
| Liam’s math degrees | 0 |
| Kevin’s year at Cambridge | 2nd |
| Cost of entry | one ChatGPT Pro sub |
For decades the message was “shut up, you’re not smart enough to touch this.” Turns out the door was just… unlocked the whole time.
🗣️ What the timeline's saying
- Mathematicians are split between “this is incredible” and “wait, is our whole gatekeeping thing… over?”
- Big names like Terence Tao have been openly experimenting with AI on hard problems — this isn’t a fluke, it’s a wave.
- The skeptics’ fair point: an AI can find an answer, but a human still has to verify it’s actually airtight (that’s where Kevin came in).
- The hype crowd’s point: the “you need a PhD to contribute to real math” wall just got a ladder thrown over it.
Somewhere a tenured professor is staring at a $200 subscription like it personally insulted his family.
💡 Why this actually matters (for you, not just nerds)
Here’s the thing nobody’s saying loud enough: the Erdős problems website is public and free. Anyone can read the unsolved ones. And Erdős was famous for attaching real money to them.
The barrier was never access. It was belief. People assumed “only geniuses allowed,” so 99.9% of curious people never even tried. Liam tried. That’s the whole difference.
This isn’t just about math. It’s proof that a normal person + a good AI can now poke at problems that used to require a lifetime of training. Music theory, chemistry, patent gaps, weird engineering puzzles — the same door is unlocked everywhere.
The genius era is ending. The curious-and-brave era is starting.
Cool. A Broke 23-Year-Old Just Out-Mathed the Professors… Now What the Hell Do We Do? (•̀ᴗ•́)و
🏴☠️ The Bounty Farmer
Erdős didn’t just leave problems — he left cash prizes on a chunk of them, and that tradition lives on. The Erdős problems site literally tags problems with dollar values. Most people scroll past because they assume it’s impossible. You’re not most people now. Feed the smaller-bounty open ones into GPT-5.4 Pro, have it draft an approach, then get a math undergrad to sanity-check before you submit.
Example: A 24-year-old self-taught coder in Kraków, Poland, filters the Erdős list for the low-hanging “$25–$500” tagged problems, runs each through ChatGPT Pro across a weekend, and gets one partial result verified by a math-student friend on Discord. First real contribution + a small payout + a name in the acknowledgments.
Timeline: First serious attempt in a weekend. Real edge lasts ~6–12 months before every math undergrad on Earth is doing the same and the easy ones are gone.
📚 Be the Erdős Scoreboard
When a new craze creates new vocabulary, whoever writes the first clear cheatsheet becomes the SEO anchor everyone links to. Right now there’s no clean, updated tracker of “which famous open problems have fallen to AI, which model did it, and how.” Build a dead-simple public page/table. You don’t solve anything — you just document the war faster than anyone else.
Example: A 21-year-old in Manila spins up a free Notion page: “AI vs. The Erdős Problems — Live Tracker.” Updates it whenever a new solve drops, cross-posts to the r/math crowd. Becomes the go-to link, then adds a “buy me a coffee” and a newsletter.
🔍 The Proof-Checker Middleman
Here’s the gap: AI can generate a proof, but journals and serious people still need a human to verify it’s not quietly wrong. Tons of amateurs will soon have AI-drafted “solutions” they can’t validate themselves. You bridge them to people who can — like folks who know Lean, the tool that formally checks proofs by computer. Take orders, route the verification, charge a finder’s fee.
Example: A math grad in Lagos who knows Lean sets up a simple service: “Send me your AI proof, I’ll tell you if it holds and formalize it.” Advertises in Lean’s Zulip community and math subreddits. Charges per proof. Turns “I think my AI solved something” panic into paid work.
🛒 Sell the Picks, Not the Gold
Everyone’s about to rush to “solve problems with AI.” The boring money is in the shovels. Curated, structured datasets of open problems + battle-tested prompt templates that actually get the AI to attack them properly. Researchers and hobbyists will pay to skip the trial-and-error. You package what took Liam luck into a repeatable kit.
Example: A 22-year-old in Bangalore compiles a clean, categorized GitHub repo of open problems across math/physics/CS with the exact prompt structures that get GPT-5.4 to engage seriously. Free repo for cred, a paid “pro pack” of advanced prompts via Gumroad.
🪟 The Co-Author Window Sprint
Right now the norms are fuzzy: papers with AI-assisted results are still getting attention and credit before institutions fully lock down the rules. There’s a short window where a well-documented amateur solve can get you real co-authorship or a citation. Team up with an actual academic (like Liam did with a Cambridge student) — you bring the AI grind, they bring the credibility to get it published.
Example: A 25-year-old hobbyist in São Paulo does the AI legwork on an open problem, then DMs a friendly PhD student he found on arXiv to co-verify and co-submit. His name lands on a real paper — something a decade of night classes might never have bought him.
🛠️ Follow-Up Actions
| Move | Where to Start |
|---|---|
 Read the actual open problems |
erdosproblems.com |
 Get the heavy AI brain |
ChatGPT Pro |
 Learn to verify proofs |
Lean community |
 Find collab-hungry researchers |
arXiv + r/math |
| Watch the pros do it |
Terence Tao’s blog |
Quick Hits
| If You Want To… | Do This |
|---|---|
| Feel like a genius today |
Paste a real open problem into ChatGPT Pro |
 Chase a math bounty |
Filter the Erdős list for cash-tagged ones |
 Get your AI proof legit |
Find a Lean checker |
 Own an SEO niche |
Build the “AI vs open problems” tracker first |
 Understand the legend |
Read up on Paul Erdős |
the gatekeepers spent 60 years guarding a door that a bored 23-year-old opened with a chatbot and zero permission. your excuse just expired.
!