And when Charton solved the Turán problem with PatternBoost, he was still at Meta. “I had literally thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of machines I could run it on,” he says. “It ran for three weeks. It was embarrassing brute force.”

Axplorer is far faster and far more efficient, according to the team at Axiom Math. Charton says it took Axplorer just 2.5 hours to match PatternBoost’s Turán result. And it runs on a single machine.

Geordie Williamson, a mathematician at the University of Sydney, who worked on PatternBoost with Charton, has not yet tried Axplorer. But he is curious to see what mathematicians do with it. (Williamson still occasionally collaborates with Charton on academic projects but says he is not otherwise connected to Axiom Math.)

Williamson says Axiom Math has made several improvements to PatternBoost that (in theory) make Axplorer applicable to a wider range of mathematical problems. “It remains to be seen how significant these improvements are,” he says.

“We are in a strange time at the moment, where lots of companies have tools that they’d like us to use,” Williamson adds. “I would say mathematicians are somewhat overwhelmed by the possibilities. It is unclear to me what impact having another such tool will be.”

Hong admits that there are a lot of AI tools being pitched at mathematicians right now. Some also require mathematicians to train their own neural networks. That’s a turnoff, says Hong, who is a mathematician herself. Instead, Axplorer will walk you through what you want to do step by step, she says.

The code for Axplorer is open source and available via GitHub. Hong hopes that students and researchers will use the tool to generate sample solutions and counterexamples to problems they’re working on, speeding up mathematical discovery.

Williamson welcomes new tools and says he uses LLMs a lot. But he doesn’t think mathematicians should throw out the whiteboards just yet. “In my biased opinion, PatternBoost is a lovely idea, but it is certainly not a panacea,” he says. “I’d love us not to forget more down-to-earth approaches.”