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The mathematician taking on AI
15 minutes Posted Oct 15, 2026 at 3:00 pm.
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Melbourne-born academic Tristan Buckmaster says he was maybe just one month away from solving the Navier-Stokes equation, a maths problem so difficult there was a million-dollar prize on offer for anyone who could.  
But just as the New York University professor and his collaborator, a mathematician affiliated with AI company Anthropic, were closing in on a solution, OpenAI claimed a breakthrough of its own.  
Today we speak to Tristan about his dispute with Open AI and the future of mathematics.
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Dr Tristan Buckmaster, Professor of Mathematics at New York University