A 23-Year-Old With Zero Math Training Just Cracked a 60-Year Erdős Problem — In One ChatGPT Prompt
A 23-Year-Old With Zero Math Training Just Cracked a 60-Year Erdős Problem — In One ChatGPT Prompthe literally said “i don’t even know what this problem is” — and Fields Medalist Terence Tao called it a new mathematical theory within 24 hours
The numbers: 1 prompt. 80 minutes of AI reasoning. 60 years of failed attempts by the world’s best mathematicians. 1 new theory born. The kid’s name is Liam Price and he calls his method “vibe maths.”
Since January 2026, 15 Erdős problems have gone from ‘open’ to ‘solved’ — 11 of them crediting AI. That number would’ve been science fiction five years ago. The barrier between “amateur with wifi” and “world-class mathematician” just got thinner than a LaTeX page margin.
🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary
| Term | What It Actually Means |
|---|---|
| Erdős Problem | A math puzzle posted by legendary mathematician Paul Erdős — there’s a whole website full of unsolved ones |
| Primitive set | A group of numbers where none of them can be evenly divided by any other number in the group |
| Erdős sum | A “score” you calculate for these special number groups — like a difficulty rating |
| Conjecture | A math guess that nobody’s been able to prove true OR false yet |
| Vibe maths | Just… asking AI to solve problems and seeing what sticks. No formal training needed |
| GPT-5.4 Pro | OpenAI’s latest reasoning model (the paid $200/month one) |
| Markov chains | A math trick where you predict next steps from current steps — like autocomplete but for equations |
| von Mangoldt weights | A 90-year-old formula that’s been sitting in a different part of math. Nobody thought to bring it here |
| Lean | A computer program that checks if a math proof is actually correct (no human bias) |
| Fields Medal | The Nobel Prize of math. Terence Tao has one. |
📖 How a Monday Afternoon Changed Mathematics
Here’s what happened on April 13, 2026:
- Liam Price, 23, no advanced math degree, opens ChatGPT
- He copy-pastes Erdős Problem #1196 — a 1968 conjecture about the maximum “score” of primitive number sets
- He didn’t know it was famous. He didn’t know it was hard. He just… does this sometimes
- GPT-5.4 Pro spent 80 minutes reasoning through it
- It produced a full proof using a method NO human mathematician had ever tried for this class of problem
- Price formatted it and posted it to the Erdős Problems forum
His literal words when asked about the significance: “I don’t even know what this problem is.”
absolute legend behavior.
🔬 Why 60 Years of Experts Missed This
According to Terence Tao — one of the greatest living mathematicians:
“People did look at it, and the humans that looked at it just collectively made a slight wrong turn at move one.”
The AI used Markov chains combined with von Mangoldt weights — a technique that existed for 90 years in a different branch of math. It was like the answer was sitting in a neighboring room and every human just kept walking past the door.
Tao called it a “meaningful contribution to the anatomy of integers that goes well beyond the solution of this particular Erdős problem” and extended it into the seed of a new mathematical theory within 24 hours.
the AI didn’t just solve the problem. it accidentally opened a new field.
🤝 The Human Part (Important)
Before we get too “AI replaces everything” — the experts weighed in:
- Mathematician Jared Lichtman (who proved a related Erdős conjecture in 2022): “The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. It required an expert to sift through.”
- The full verification, reformulation, and extension into theory = human work
- The proof has been formally verified in Lean (computer-checked) so it’s airtight
So the recipe was: amateur asks the right question → AI finds a weird angle → experts clean it up → new math is born.
That’s the real workflow. Not “AI does everything” — but AI as the creative spark nobody expected.
📊 The Receipts
| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Solver’s age | 23 |
| Math degrees | 0 |
| Time AI spent reasoning | ~80 minutes |
| Years problem went unsolved | 60 (since 1968) |
| Cost of ChatGPT Pro subscription | $200/month |
| Erdős problems solved with AI since Jan 2026 | 11 out of 15 total |
| Time for Terence Tao to validate | <24 hours |
| New mathematical theories spawned | 1 (and counting) |
🌊 The 'Vibe Maths' Movement
Price and his collaborator Kevin Barreto (a 2nd-year Cambridge undergrad) started this trend late 2025:
- They’d grab random problems from the Erdős Problems website
- Paste them into the FREE version of ChatGPT
- See what came back
- An AI researcher noticed and gifted them both ChatGPT Pro subscriptions
They call it “vibe maths” — intuitive questioning, no formal method, just vibes and repeated attempts. The mathematical equivalent of “let me just try random stuff until something works.”
And now they’re making history.
Cool. So the world’s hardest math problems are now speedruns for broke college kids with a $200 subscription. Now What the Hell Do We Do? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
🕳️ The Bounty Hunter's Shortcut
There are math competitions and foundations that pay actual cash for solving open problems. The Millennium Prize Problems each carry a $1 million bounty. But there are dozens of smaller bounties ($500-$10,000) posted by mathematicians on various forums and conjecture boards.
The play: Feed every known open problem with a posted bounty into AI reasoning models. You’re not doing math — you’re doing quality control on AI outputs and pattern-matching which answers look non-trivial enough to submit.
Example: A 26-year-old data analyst in Portugal finds 3 open combinatorics problems on MathOverflow with informal bounties, feeds them to GPT-5.4 and Claude, gets a partial result on one, emails the problem’s author, splits credit on the resulting paper — gets $2,000 from a foundation + a co-author credit.
Timeline: First submission in 3 days. First actual payout in 4-8 weeks (peer review). This window narrows fast as more people catch on.
🎣 The Proof-Cleaning Service
Here’s the thing — AI outputs are messy. Lichtman literally said the raw proof was “quite poor.” But cleaning up an AI-generated proof into publishable form? That’s a SKILL. And right now nobody’s selling it.
Set up a service: researchers/amateurs who get interesting AI outputs but can’t formalize them pay you to turn garbage-tier LaTeX into submission-ready papers. You need intermediate math literacy, not genius.
Example: A 28-year-old math tutor in Nigeria notices 4 people on the Erdős Problems forum posting AI-generated “solutions” that are clearly rough. She DMs each one offering cleanup for $300-$800 per paper. Gets 2 clients in week one. Charges $500, takes 6 hours per paper using Lean to check logic and Overleaf for formatting.
📡 The Conjecture Radar Bot
There’s no single dashboard that tracks: which open problems exist + which ones AI models are closest to solving + which have bounties/prestige attached. Build it.
Scrape Erdős Problems, Open Problem Garden, MathOverflow bounties, and the Polymath Project. Cross-reference with public AI benchmark results to flag “ripe” problems. Sell early access to the list.
Example: A 21-year-old CS student in Romania builds a Telegram bot that pings subscribers when a new problem appears that matches “low-complexity, high-reward” criteria. Charges $15/month. Gets 200 subscribers from math Twitter within 3 weeks. Revenue: $3,000/month for a bot that runs on a $5 VPS.
🪟 The Academic Credit Arbitrage
Universities still haven’t figured out how to handle AI-assisted research. Right now, if you contribute to a solved conjecture — even as “the person who typed the prompt” — you can get co-author credit. Academic credit = future job offers, speaking gigs, PhD admission leverage.
The play: Systematically collaborate with math undergrads who know how to verify but don’t have ChatGPT Pro ($200/month is expensive for students). You provide the compute, they provide the verification, you share credit.
Example: A 24-year-old marketing guy in Indonesia DMs 15 math undergrads from UK/EU universities on Discord, offers them free GPT-5.4 access in exchange for co-authorship on any results. Within 2 months, one partnership produces a minor result on a graph theory conjecture. He lists “co-author, published mathematical research” on his LinkedIn. Gets recruited for a quant trading intern role paying $8K/month — zero math background, just the credit.
🎰 The Vibe Math Content Machine
“Vibe maths” is a brand-new term that barely exists yet. The SEO opportunity is wide open. But don’t make a YouTube channel about it — too slow. Instead: become the definitive reference.
Build the first vibe maths glossary/playbook site. Document every AI-solved problem, the prompt used, the model, the technique that worked. Researchers will link to you. Math students will bookmark you. You become the Wikipedia of AI-math before Wikipedia catches up.
Example: A 19-year-old web dev in Morocco spins up a Notion-based wiki (free), documents the 15 AI-solved Erdős problems with links to original papers, tweets from Tao, and the exact prompts used. Shares it on r/math and Hacker News. Gets 50K unique visitors in week one. Slaps on a $5/month “early access to new solutions” tier via Ko-fi. 400 subscribers = $2,000/month passive.
🛠️ Follow-Up Actions
| Want | Do |
|---|---|
| Try vibe maths yourself | Get ChatGPT Pro ($200/mo) or use free Claude/Gemini on easier problems from Erdős Problems |
| Learn to verify proofs | Install Lean and do the Natural Number Game (free, takes a weekend) |
| Find open problems with bounties | Browse MathOverflow and Open Problem Garden |
| Understand what Price actually solved | Read the buildfastwithai breakdown |
| Connect with the vibe maths community | Search “vibe maths” + “Erdős” on Twitter/X, join r/mathematics |
Quick Hits
| Want | Do |
|---|---|
| Solve unsolved problems yourself |
Feed problems from erdosproblems.com into GPT-5.4 Pro or Claude |
 Find math bounties |
Check Clay Mathematics Institute + smaller MathOverflow bounties |
 Verify AI proofs |
Learn Lean proof assistant — free, open source |
 Understand the backstory |
Read Scientific American’s full piece |
 Start with easy mode |
Try the Natural Number Game to learn formal proof basics |
a 23-year-old who “doesn’t even know what the problem is” just outperformed 60 years of PhDs by typing one sentence into a chatbot. the excuse era is over. vibe math is real and the universe is cooked.
!