Mathematicians Hate AI. They Can’t Quit It

Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster believes OpenAI used his work to rush ahead and beat him to solving a legendary math problem with a $1 million bounty.

But that’s not been enough for him to stop using the company’s models—and he’s not the only mathematician that feels that way.

“Even if you don't agree with any of this, you're kind of stuck. With AI being so useful, it's hard to completely prevent oneself from using it,” Buckmaster tells WIRED. “These companies have a monopoly, and there is not much choice,” he adds.

In the week and half since the New York University professor accused OpenAI of copying his approach, Buckmaster has been using the company’s coding agent Codex to tidy up his research papers. When he has time to do math (which he says is rare, since the fallout thrust him into the spotlight), the tool has been helping him understand the logical steps OpenAI’s agents might have taken to get from his earlier workings to the final proof.

Buckmaster had used Codex as well as Anthropic’s competing Claude to work on what’s known as the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, alongside Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge. OpenAI deployed tens of thousands of agents to reach the solution, but only after it learned the equation was close to being solved, Buckmaster says.

When Buckmaster went public with his claims, it ignited a firestorm about artificial intelligence and whether it would make human mathematicians obsolete. It also led OpenAI to do an investigation and amend its announcement about solving Navier-Stokes to say it “confirmed that Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the two months preceding this announcement and paper on September 8, 2026, could not have influenced the system in any way, including through training.” The company pointed WIRED to its announcement in an email.

“I set it aside,” Thom recalls. “I'm not so much interested in these political things; I want to work on mathematics.”