Mathematicians used AI agents to show M23 is a Galois group over Q, closing the last of the 26 sporadic cases
Scientific American (corroborated by MIT paper PDF and Epoch AI)·high signal
A six-person team including MIT's Bjorn Poonen and Colorado State's Rachel Pries used AI agents to search symmetry combinations and produce an explicit degree-23 polynomial whose Galois group over the rationals is the Mathieu group M23. This settles the last open sporadic case of the inverse Galois problem, which had stood since the 1980s, and Epoch AI listed it as a FrontierMath open problem. The humans led the proof, and the agents did the search, which is the division of labour that is producing results in research math right now.