The man paid to prove Fermat by hand says Claude did it in 11 days
A mathematician holds a five-year grant to formalise Fermat’s Last Theorem. It has been done for him in eleven days, and he says the result tells us nothing about mathematics.
Anthropic published the proof on Friday. Dozens of Claude agents wrote 13 million lines of Lean code and proved 30,300 intermediate theorems. They used 29,500 of those in a complete, computer-checked proof of a conjecture Pierre de Fermat scribbled in a margin around 1637.
Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London has led the community effort to formalise the same theorem since 2024, funded by the EPSRC. He compiled Anthropic’s code himself and ran the standard checking tool over it. Then he wrote it up on his blog under the headline “Anthropic has beaten me to it”.
What he actually said about it
Buzzard’s verdict divides cleanly in two, and most coverage has taken only the first half.
On the...
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