A former NFL player named John Urschel decided to do some light reading this week, and for him that meant leafing through the latest math papers from OpenAI about topics such as the Riemann hypothesis.
“Oh my lord,” he thought. “I was absolutely floored.”
Urschel was blown away by the findings because he happened to understand the hundreds of proofs better than nearly any human on the planet. Nine years ago, he traded the National Football League for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And Monday, instead of studying abstract play designs, he was publishing some impenetrable language of his own to prove a decades-old mathematical conjecture.
Urschel’s paper, titled “On the Growth Factor of Random Matrices,” is one in a deluge of AI-assisted proofs that mathematicians have achieved in this new era when they can combine their genius with supercomputing power. But within this community of brainiacs, there isn’t a single person quite like the 35-year-old Urschel. After three years with the Baltimore Ravens, the offensive lineman who was listed at 6-foot-3 and 313 pounds ditched his helmet to become a professional egghead in 2017. And he hasn’t regretted it for a moment since. . . .
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