This clearly hit a nerve in very interesting ways!

Suppose we have a very convincing math PhD impersonator, agreeing and making some prepared smart-sounding comments saying they understood the proof and it seems to make sense - would it?

Well, most would say - NO! Obviously not, knowing this person was an impersonator. Others now knowing could be convinced of the validity.

Very simple thought exercise that allows to conclude, someone "saying they understood" (or agree) bears absolutely no weight to something's validity.

The idea that OpenAI's proofs are fake is contradicted by the response of mathematicians. Were they fake, mathematicians would not consider this release important enough to comment upon[1,2], as vixra always provided a steady supply of such writings. Nor would they be able to write expositions and simplifications, of which several are published each day on arxiv (just search OpenAI on arxiv to find them).

But perhaps mathematicians are no longer able to be the best judge if a proof is valid. Yet nobody but them is able to even understand what is claimed to have been resolved.

It is really strange to see mathematicians of the highest rank taking these results seriously[3], holding lectures explaining them, yet see it dismissed here as a mass psychosis. [1]https://smf.emath.fr/actualites-smf/20-10-26-communique-sur-... [2]https://www.mathsoc.jp/publicity/news20261016.html [3]https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/19/a-sketch-of-the-pr...

> Were they fake, mathematicians would not consider this release important enough to comment upon[1,2], as vixra always provided a steady supply of such writings.

Few articles on vixra are made by companies with ~$1T valuations.

Now imagine that PhD “impersonator” has, in the past few months, made more demonstrable progress in mathematics than anyone in history.

I think that would change the conclusion of the argument a little.

Or maybe the PhD impersonator discovered a soundness bug in a component of Lean and was able to exploit it.

With no humans able to understand the proofs the impersonator has produced, there's no way of knowing.

This is true of literally any proof of sufficient complexity, human-authored or otherwise.

It takes time to convey the core ideas. It takes time for other mathematicians to come up to speed on the new techniques and approaches or the novel combinations of existing ones.

The actual experts in this field have asked for the argument to be explained to them, and are now at the point where they believe this is plausible. Another person in this thread has produced a Lean proof and presumably is not trying to pull a fast one on us by exploiting a bug in the solver.

TL;DR chill bro.

More realistically, that impersonator has created lots of output, and the correct ones are selectively publicized (and few particularly interesting bad answers).