OpenAI has published full or partial solutions to 372 outstanding mathematical problems, stunning mathematicians and forcing them to question the future of the field. The announcement – which has been described as the “mathpocalypse” – took place on Tuesday. It comes a month after OpenAI announced a proposed proof for the Navier-Stokes equation, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems which mark the peak of human ambition in the field. Mathematicians have been taken aback by the speed of mathematical progress in AI, which struggled with GCSE-level maths problems less than two years ago. The proposed proofs, which are described in 722 papers, are so complex and so numerous that even understanding them poses a gigantic problem for mathematicians, and many have not been verified. “If you want some sense of what things feel like now in maths, imagine a hunter-gatherer who’s spent his entire life learning to survive deep in an unforgiving rainforest, then a giant resort hotel springs up right next to him with a helipad and heated pools and Airbnbs,” wrote Scott Aaronson, …