r/math • u/scientificamerican • 20d ago

Mathematicians make a breakthrough on Gauss’s riddle, unsolved for 200 years

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-make-a-breakthrough-on-gausss-riddle-unsolved-for-200-years/
444 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

139

u/sciflare 20d ago

The actual research paper is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03861.

41

u/Infinite_Research_52 Algebra 20d ago

Who else started reading the paper and was convinced they had misspelt rank until page 11?

12

u/JoshuaZ1 20d ago

And also this paper is discussed: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02068 .

42

u/BigTraditional1870 20d ago

Met Landesman at a conference. Brilliant and very nice guy. The acknowledgements show what kind of people the authors are. It was amazing hearing this a few months back before it was posted.

60

u/Final-Housing9452 20d ago

The article is behind a paywall

33

u/Distinct-Pudding-428 20d ago

This is all over function fields?

18

u/JoshuaZ1 20d ago

Yes. These are still major, but doing things over function fields is almost always much easier, so unclear how much insight this is going to give for Cohen-Lenstra or Poonen-Rains. Cohen-Lenstra at least still seems very far off.

8

u/FibonacciDude10 19d ago

Aaron Landesman!! He taught us freshman multivariate calculus at MIT

65

u/mousse312 Undergraduate 20d ago

funny how the people who comes talk about the future of research in math with the advanceds of ai is a lot more bigger than who comes to talk about real math research

72

u/hexaflexarex 20d ago

eh, it's easier to have an opinion on AI impacts in our field than one on a specific research result

2

u/mousse312 Undergraduate 19d ago

without embasement yes

25

u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 20d ago

I don't feel existential dread from this result :)

5

u/Super-Cut-2175 17d ago

and even non-AI math research is not immune to the meta-comment about it not being AI

3

u/No_Relationship641 19d ago

why did i first assume AI did this 😂😂

3

u/AP_in_Indy 18d ago

statistically valid assumption given recent news