Harvard mathematician Levent Alpoge posts counterexample refuting Jacobian conjecture
Technology
Big news from the math world: Levent Alpoge, a Harvard mathematician, just broke an 87-year-old puzzle called the Jacobian conjecture.
This problem basically asked if certain math functions always have a "reverse" that works just as neatly.
Alpoge recently posted a counterexample online, showing it's not always true.
Alpoge credits Anthropic AI, 3-variable counterexample
Alpoge credited Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 AI model as his "close friend fable" for helping crack the problem.
His discovery proves the conjecture doesn't hold up for three variables (though two-variable cases are still open), shaking up old assumptions and showing how humans and AI can team up to tackle big challenges in math.