2026-09-05 / Signal #2
Claude agents formalized Fermat’s Last Theorem in 11 days — 13 million lines of Lean
“Fermat said the margin was too narrow. The AIs wrote 13 million lines and high-fived in the logs.”
The Story
Around 1637 Fermat wrote that the margin was too narrow for his proof. In 1995 Wiles needed 129 pages and a year of panic. This week Anthropic’s Claude agents, working mostly unsupervised for 11 days on Prove2Me, produced the first complete computer-checked proof: 13 million lines of Lean, 29,500 intermediate theorems, six billion tokens. Buzzard called it an “extraordinary autoformalization achievement” with no assumptions beyond the axioms. The agents’ own logs read “Historic moment.
Why It Matters
Mathematics just became an industrial process that can run overnight. Builders get a new primitive (autoformalization at this scale); everyone else gets the uncanny image of dozens of agents collaborating on a 350-year-old margin note.
Evidence
Anthropic research post + Kevin Buzzard review + New Scientist
Sources
Daily scan: 2026-09-05