The Unreasonable Effectiveness of LLMs in Mathematics
chrishayduk.com · 4,053 words · saved by 1 readers
A journey into the mathematician's unconscious
In July 2024, DeepMind unveiled AlphaProof — an AlphaZero-inspired agent that constructs mathematical arguments in Lean, a programming language for proofs. It broke new ground in mathematical performance, achieving a silver medal in the 2024 International Math Olympiad. One year later, in July 2025, OpenAI announced that they had achieved a gold medal in the 2025 International Math Olympiad using a raw LLM — no reinforcement learning in Lean space, no translation between natural language and formal proof languages. In the span of a few weeks, this same model would go on to add a gold medal…
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