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AI agents formalize the 15,000-page classification of finite simple groups in 24 days
Axiom Math says it directed produced a complete of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, one of the longest proofs in mathematics, spread across more than 500 papers by about 100 mathematicians. The result is about 43.1 million lines of Lean, built on the Mathlib library, between October 2nd and October 25th. The code is public on GitHub.
The logged 34 deviations from the published record. Most were typos and dropped hypotheses. Two were real: a counterexample to a step in John Walter's 1986 proof of the Unbalanced Group Theorem, and a false equality in a lemma in Aschbacher and Smith's quasithin volumes, both repaired with help from Richard Lyons and Ronald Solomon, two of the classification's principal authors.
A machine check proves the formal statements follow from the axioms. It does not prove those statements say what mathematicians mean by the classification, and Axiom says human review of the definitions is still required. SourcesAA
Sources
- AFormalizing the Enormous Theorem (Axiom Math)axiommath.ai
- AAxiomMath/CFSG (GitHub)github.com
This story ran in the Morning Brief of October 28th 2026.