Chinese doctor stuns maths world by cracking decades-old problem using ChatGPT

ByAtlasnews

Aug 14, 2026 #AI, #Alex Townsend, #Anthropic, #Astra, #Beijing, #ChatGPT Work, #claude, #Cornell University, #Crouzeix's conjecture, #gpt, #Jin Shanmu, #Michel Crouzeix, #OpenAI, #Peking Union Medical College Hospital, #Riemann hypothesis, #SCMP Tech

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Chinese doctor stuns maths world by cracking decades-old problem using ChatGPT

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Frontier artificial intelligence models are making rapid progress in mathematics. Photo: Shutterstock

Xinmei ShenPublished: 10:00am, 14 Aug 2026

When Beijing-based neurosurgeon Jin Shanmu pulled up a chair at his computer, he was not looking to make mathematical history. He was simply trying to crack a problem related to brain ultrasounds.

Instead, the self-taught maths enthusiast, with help from OpenAI’s latest flagship artificial intelligence (AI) model, solved a two-decade-old mathematical puzzle that had frustrated experts around the world since 2004.

Jin, a postdoctoral researcher and resident at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, managed to prove Crouzeix’s conjecture, a problem in numerical linear algebra.

His tool? A 16-hour autonomous run on GPT-5.6-Sol, operating on the ChatGPT Work platform.

Proposed by French mathematician Michel Crouzeix, the conjecture posits that the norm of applying any function to a matrix is no larger than twice the function’s maximum value on that matrix’s numerical range.

While abstract, it has long been an intriguing problem in matrix analysis – a field Jin stumbled into while undertaking research on transcranial ultrasounds.

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