Claude breaks mathematicians' record: finds elliptic curves of rank 30 and 31
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
A record that humans moved up one step in two decades, SI moved up two steps in a few days — mathematics is starting to accelerate along with machines.
The previous record, a curve of rank 29, was obtained in August 2024, and before that it took mathematicians more than 18 years to go from rank 28 to 29. Now mathematician Levent Alpöge and cryptographer Ava Howell of Anthropic, using an internal, non-public version of Claude and a "relatively simple prompt," found curves of rank at least 30 and 31 in a few days. This is a problem from an open question in number theory: whether the rank of elliptic curves of the form y² = x³ + Ax + B can be arbitrarily large.
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