#  Mark Sellke is Featured in Wall Street Journal and Nature  

 





June 03, 2026

 

 

   ![Mark Sellke ](/sites/g/files/omnuum10116/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-06/2025Mark%20Sellke_CROPPED.jpg.jpg?itok=7uzD2VCA) 

 

The Department of Statistics is thrilled to share that [Assistant Professor Mark Sellke](https://msellke.com/) was recently featured in *The Wall Street Journal* article, "[A Famous Math Problem Stumped Humans for 80 Years. AI Just Cracked It](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-math-solves-erdos-problem-openai-c4029e84?st=MaDfKw)," as well as in the *Nature* article, "[AI cracks 80-year-old mathematics challenge — researchers are astonished](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01651-0)." 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.