India, Oct. 1 -- Imagine spending a decade trying to solve one of mathematics' hardest problems. You finally make progress only to see an AI model produce a possible solution in a matter of days.

This is what happened to Tristan Buckmaster, a 41-year-old Australian mathematician at New York University who has spent years studying the mathematics of how fluids move and behave.

At the core of the issue are the Navier-Stokes equations, a set of mathematical equations developed in the 19th century to describe how fluids move. Engineers and scientists use them to model everything from airflow around aircraft to weather systems.

But mathematicians still aren't sure whether these equations always hold, or could break down and produce an infin...