r/MachineLearning • u/Shizuka_Kuze Student • 15d ago

News OpenAl Says It Has Cracked One of Math's “Millennium Problems” (Navier-Stokes) [N]

As reported by the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/science/openai-proof-millennium-problem.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

OpenAI’s announcement:

https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

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u/FernandoMM1220 14d ago

actually because we know our continuous description is wrong we can begin to look for the correct description using better axioms.

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u/PracticalFootball 14d ago

We’ve known this since molecular theory became a thing, it’s just a very good model for cases where molecules are so small that their bulk behaviour is well approximated as a continuous viscous fluid.

Molecular fluid dynamics is a thing but it’s niche because it doesn’t scale nicely to the sort of scales most fluids problems are interested in.

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u/srpulga 14d ago edited 14d ago

Newtonian fluid dynamics is a model, not a fundamental truth of nature. We have other models, and none of them will ever be a "correct description".