OpenAI announced on Sept. 8 that one of its internal artificial intelligence (AI) models had found the solution to a generations-long mathematical problem that deals with the natural mechanics of fluids like water and air.
The Navier–Stokes equations govern how humans understand weather, ocean currents, blood flow, and aircraft and vehicle aerodynamics, and have been around for nearly 200 years. Mathematicians have spent decades trying to understand how smooth three-dimensional fluids can break down, and whether all the equations converge into sensible solutions despite their widespread success in various applications.
This question, known as the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, or Navier–Stokes for short, was selected in 2000 as one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s Millennium Prize Problems—considered the seven most important mathematical problems….