Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics

40 hours, $2M+ AI credits,solve an open problem. AI has made groundbreaking progress in pure math in the past few months: May 20, 2026: Erdos's planar unit-distance conjecture was disproved (open 80 years)[1]. August 1, 2026: The first explicit non-sofic group was constructed (open 27 years)[2]. August 23, 2026: The six-sphere was shown to admit a complex structure (open 78 years; unverified)[3]. This AI advancement raises the following questions: (a) How much can AI speed up the process from id