The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice

Beautiful article. Reading this after having mixed feeling and honestly a bit depressed about the Navier-Stokes situation feels almost like therapy, and I had to try really hard to hold back tears.

The Riverside Park has always been beautiful but particularly this time of year. Maybe I should pay a visit again, sitting on a bench thinking thoughts.

What a great story! I'm not sure why I felt teary eyed reading it, but I was. If you're here in the comments but haven't read it -- it is worth the read.

Very lovely story. As noted in the article I couldn't help but feel it was a mirror to the story of Ramanujan.

Beautiful article.

https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/scienc...

Stunning, heart-warming read.

This is possibly more exciting and of more future value than solving Navier Stokes.

It also shows us a way, when it seems we are lost.

A heartwarming story about a teenager cold-emailing a famous mathematician and getting mentorship—provided that she lives ten blocks away, rapidly solves Herstein problems with original proof ideas, catches the interest of multiple topologists, and eventually helps solve a decades-old open problem.

The takeaway for ordinary students is presumably: “Simply be an extraordinary mathematical talent who happens to live next door to a lonely 92-year-old legend.”

Hard to read all the gated content :-(

Beautiful story.

> Dr. Breuillard had been leading an effort to solve the question with the help of an A.I. chatbot. That humans appear to have sorted it out first — and these three particular humans — “almost feels like a blessing,” he said.

This is such a contrast to current OpenAI controversy: https://bbc.com/news/articles/cy7zygy3rl2o

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/science/92-year-old-mathe...

In spite of it all I do love human obsessives, with all their charming inefficiencies. This made me want to work as hard as I can on something important to me. I’m going to spend the night reading poems. And a great reminder of the value of a good mentor

Interesting article. Pity it was so full of human factors, and so low on actual mathematics.

Such a nice story to take us out of the news cycle of ai in math

I know its the wrong take away, but some would summarize it as:

1) first dissuade others from proving the theorem

2) use child labor to actually prove the theorem