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The Year in Math

Landmark results in geometry and number theory marked an exciting year for mathematics, at a time when advances in artificial intelligence are starting to transform the subject’s future.

It is the best of its kind not just because it’s a seminal piece of mathematics — one that resolved a huge open problem and is now poised to influence decades of research to come — but because it involved forging deep and unexpected connections. But this year, new models from Google DeepMind turned AI into a serious competitor in the International Mathematical Olympiad, the world’s premier math competition for high school students. Within half a year, AlphaGeometry 2 could achieve gold easily — and, when integrated with Google’s large language model Gemini, could prove more general problems well enough to score a silver medal on the full Olympiad exam.

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