The Longest Math Proof Ever, in Minecraft Survival Mode

Humans listed the atoms of symmetry; Axiom says its AI agents have now formalized the list with zero cheats

Image by the author, in the style of Minecraft. Not affiliated with Mojang

On October 26, a company called Axiom announced that its AI agents had translated the longest proof ever written by humans into Lean, a language a computer can check line by line, and that the result has no gaps. The claim is Axiom’s own: its repository labels the review “self-assessed”, and Axiom is the only reviewer it lists.

The proof runs for about 15,000 pages, spread over more than 500 articles, written by roughly 100 people across decades. I am not a mathematician, and I could not get through page 12.

So I did what I do with every problem too big for my head. I looked for blocks. I suspect it is the only way in, and I suspect it is what the mathematicians did too. Nobody holds 15,000 pages in their head, so you cut the problem into pieces small enough to hold, and you stack them.