The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice
nytimes.comBeautiful article. Reading this after having mixed feeling and honestly a bit depressed about the Navier-Stokes situation feels almost like therapy, and I had to try really hard to hold back tears.
The Riverside Park has always been beautiful but particularly this time of year. Maybe I should pay a visit again, sitting on a bench thinking thoughts.
What a great story! I'm not sure why I felt teary eyed reading it, but I was. If you're here in the comments but haven't read it -- it is worth the read.
Very lovely story. As noted in the article I couldn't help but feel it was a mirror to the story of Ramanujan.
Beautiful article.
https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/scienc...
Just FYI, I only get a "Welcome to nginx!" page there.
A heartwarming story about a teenager cold-emailing a famous mathematician and getting mentorship—provided that she lives ten blocks away, rapidly solves Herstein problems with original proof ideas, catches the interest of multiple topologists, and eventually helps solve a decades-old open problem.
The takeaway for ordinary students is presumably: “Simply be an extraordinary mathematical talent who happens to live next door to a lonely 92-year-old legend.”
Stunning, heart-warming read.
This is possibly more exciting and of more future value than solving Navier Stokes.
It also shows us a way, when it seems we are lost.
Beautiful story.
> Dr. Breuillard had been leading an effort to solve the question with the help of an A.I. chatbot. That humans appear to have sorted it out first — and these three particular humans — “almost feels like a blessing,” he said.
This is such a contrast to current OpenAI controversy: https://bbc.com/news/articles/cy7zygy3rl2o
Hard to read all the gated content :-(
In spite of it all I do love human obsessives, with all their charming inefficiencies. This made me want to work as hard as I can on something important to me. I’m going to spend the night reading poems. And a great reminder of the value of a good mentor
Interesting article. Pity it was so full of human factors, and so low on actual mathematics.
There is a link to the paper in the article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05283
I know its the wrong take away, but some would summarize it as:
1) first dissuade others from proving the theorem
2) use child labor to actually prove the theorem
Such a nice story to take us out of the news cycle of ai in math