Mark Sellke is Featured in Wall Street Journal and Nature

The Department of Statistics is thrilled to share that Assistant Professor Mark Sellke was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal article, "A Famous Math Problem Stumped Humans for 80 Years. AI Just Cracked It," as well as in the Nature article, "AI cracks 80-year-old mathematics challenge — researchers are astonished." Sellke was part of the OpenAI research team behind a groundbreaking advance in mathematics.

Sellke's team used an OpenAI model to help solve a famous 80-year-old problem posed by legendary mathematician Paul Erdős, overturning a long-held conjecture about the unit distance problem. Erdős thought he had found the best possible answer to the question: if you put n dots on a sheet of paper, how many pairs of dots can be exactly one unit apart?  However, OpenAI’s model produced a counterexample that yielded a better answer than Erdős's original estimate. The result has been hailed by leading mathematicians as a milestone for both mathematics and artificial intelligence, demonstrating AI's growing ability to contribute original insights.