Claude builds the first fully computer-verified proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 days
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
What mathematicians considered years of work, SI did in a week and a half: huge proofs can now be rechecked by machine in their entirety, which opens the way to verifying all of modern mathematics.
Dozens of Claude agents, working almost autonomously, wrote 13 million lines in the Lean proof language and proved about 29.5 thousand intermediate theorems; Lean verified the result, relying only on three standard axioms. It took about 6 billion output tokens. The first attempt fell apart: the agents lost track of what had already been proved and duplicated work. Things moved forward after the open-source coordinator Prove2Me from Columbia University was added. The work builds on Kevin Buzzard's project (Imperial College) and the Mathlib library; Buzzard called it "a big step toward automatic formalization of modern mathematics," although the proof adds no new mathematics: it follows Wiles's classical 1995 line.