Peking University's Dong Bin: AI is taking math into a better era
Dong Bin, a Boya Distinguished Professor at Peking University's Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research, said at a 2026 Future Science dialogue on mathematics and computer science that after OpenAI released 722 math manuscripts at once, mathematicians worldwide rushed to check whether problems in their fields had been solved, with some areas described by peers as hard-hit. He noted three of those manuscripts have already been retracted for errors and that the results mainly push existing tools further. Dong's AI4MATH team built Rethlas-Archon, which in April disproved the long-open Anderson conjecture by constructing a counterexample fully automatically and with no human involvement, then formalized it in roughly 20,000 lines of Lean 4 code, drawing feature coverage from Nature. Dong argues AI already surpasses individuals in knowledge coverage and still has room to improve in reasoning, but has yet to show the mathematical taste needed to pose good hypotheses and judge which problems matter, suggesting firms focus on model training while universities supply data, hard evaluation problems and theory.
It offers a working mathematician's view of which parts of math research AI has already overtaken and where human judgment still decides the agenda.