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This 17-year-old Israeli Helped Revolutionize Mathematics With Artificial Intelligence

Researchers at Israel’s Technion – including a high-school girl – have created the ‘Ramanujan Machine,’ a revolutionary generator of conjectures on fundamental constants, which usually take a lifetime to formulate

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The Technion’s Prof. Ido Kaminer, right, and 17-year-old high-school student Yahel Manor, who is responsible for some of the team’s most interesting discoveries.
The Technion’s Prof. Ido Kaminer, right, and 17-year-old high-school student Yahel Manor, who is responsible for some of the team’s most interesting discoveries.Credit: Rami Shllush
Asaf Ronel
Asaf Ronel
Asaf Ronel
Asaf Ronel

Artificial intelligence has performed creative tasks in recent years that were considered doable only by human beings not long ago. These range from beating people in a variety of complex games to writing stories.

Now, researchers at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have come up with an algorithmic system that, within hours, can discover mathematical conjectures that some of the greatest mathematicians of all time spent significant portions of their lives formulating. The new “conjecture generator,” which the researchers call a Ramanujan Machine, has even produced conjectures that were previously undiscovered.