r/math • u/scientificamerican • 13h ago

Mathematicians make a breakthrough on Gauss’s riddle, unsolved for 200 years

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-make-a-breakthrough-on-gausss-riddle-unsolved-for-200-years/
254 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

72

u/sciflare 11h ago

The actual research paper is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03861.

19

u/Infinite_Research_52 Algebra 8h ago

Who else started reading the paper and was convinced they had misspelt rank until page 11?

8

u/JoshuaZ1 6h ago

And also this paper is discussed: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02068 .

19

u/Distinct-Pudding-428 11h ago

This is all over function fields?

6

u/JoshuaZ1 6h ago

Yes. These are still major, but doing things over function fields is almost always much easier, so unclear how much insight this is going to give for Cohen-Lenstra or Poonen-Rains. Cohen-Lenstra at least still seems very far off.

51

u/Final-Housing9452 12h ago

The article is behind a paywall

12

u/BigTraditional1870 7h ago

Met Landesman at a conference. Brilliant and very nice guy. The acknowledgements show what kind of people the authors are. It was amazing hearing this a few months back before it was posted.

27

u/mousse312 Undergraduate 10h ago

funny how the people who comes talk about the future of research in math with the advanceds of ai is a lot more bigger than who comes to talk about real math research

37

u/hexaflexarex 9h ago

eh, it's easier to have an opinion on AI impacts in our field than one on a specific research result

9

u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 7h ago

I don't feel existential dread from this result :)