Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities(anthropic.com)
276 points by tosh 11 days ago | 177 comments
tl;dr: An unreleased research version of Claude, while attempting the Riemann hypothesis, instead improved a longstanding lower bound on the fraction of Riemann zeta function zeros satisfying the hypothesis from 41.6% to 67.2%. Using 31 million output tokens across two Claude Code sessions with ~60 subagents, it combined prior work by Bombieri and Baluyot et al., producing both a paper and a Lean-formalized proof validated by Anthropic mathematicians and external experts. The user's prompting was largely limited to encouragement like "keep going."
HN Discussion:
  • Amusement at the absurdity of 'believe in yourself' prompting working for serious math
  • Awe at the significance of AI improving a real mathematical bound
  • Prior anecdotal experiences corroborate Claude's mathematical capabilities
  • Curiosity about why systematic, more rigorous mathematical exploration hasn't been pursued further
  • Surprise at the resource scale (60 subagents) required, highlighting accessibility gap