A mathematician spent a year on one of the hardest open problems in math. He asked OpenAI a simple question. Did you train on my sessions? Today they answered. Sort of.
Here is what happened.
The setup
Tristan Buckmaster is a math professor at NYU. He and Levent Alpöge spent most of the past year attacking finite-time blowup for fluid equations, the family of problems that includes the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize. They worked with LLMs the whole way. Claude, Codex, GPT-5.6 Sol, Astra. By August 15 they had blowup results for Boussinesq and 3D Euler. By August 22 they had a proof verified in Lean.
Every draft of the project went through Codex. His words, from his statement: "our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project."
