New Delhi, Oct. 13 -- "SOMETIMES PEOPLE have the wrong idea of maths and think that it will be overtaken by computers," said the mathematician Alain Connes in 2000. He was describing why a team of esteemed mathematicians were offering $1m rewards for solutions to seven intractable mathematical conundrums. These Millennium Prize problems, said Dr Connes, "are totally inaccessible to computers".

But computers got better. In early September OpenAI, an American firm, claimed one of its internal AI models had solved a Millennium Prize problem: the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, which relates to the motion of fluids. It was only the second of the lot to be conquered and the first to fall to a machine. Mathematicians had been w...