AI’s greatest mathematical successes have come from answers to problems posed by a mid-20th century iconoclast. By examining what makes the Erdős problems unique, mathematicians are trying to understand how AI might change the rest of math. On May 20, 2026, OpenAI made an announcement that shook the mathematical world. An internal AI model — one not available to the public — had come up with a counterexample to the “unit distance” problem, a conjecture made in 1946 by Paul Erdős, the prolific, i...