British mathematician Timothy Gowers had ChatGPT 5.5 Pro tackle open problems in number theory. The model significantly improved an existing mathematical bound. One of the junior researchers involved calls the model's key idea "completely original."
Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers writes in his blog that ChatGPT 5.5 Pro has produced a piece of doctoral-level mathematical research, and that his own mathematical contribution was zero. The model did all the work in under two hours. "I didn't even do anything clever with the prompts," Gowers writes.
The mathematician, who holds the Combinatorics Chair at the College de France and is a Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, fed the model open problems from a paper by number theorist Mel Nathanson. The paper investigates the possible sizes of certain sets of integer sums and how efficiently sets with prescribed properties can be constructed.
Nathanson had proved an exponential bound for one of the problems and asked whether it could be improved. According to Gowers, ChatGPT 5.5 Pro thought for 17 minutes and 5 seconds, then delivered the best possible construction with a quadratic bound. The core idea: the model swapped out a component in Nathanson's proof for a more efficient variant that's well known in combinatorics but whose application to this particular problem wasn't obvious.
