Mehtaab Sawhney
Mehtaab Sawhney | |
|---|---|
| Born | Mehtaab Singh Sawhney September 20, 1998 |
| Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania (attended) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS, PhD) |
| Awards | Morgan Prize (2021) Clay Research Fellowship (2024) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Workplaces | MIT Cambridge University Columbia University OpenAI |
| Thesis | Probabilistic and analytic methods in combinatorics (2024) |
| Yufei Zhao | |
Mehtaab Sawhney (born September 20, 1998) is an American mathematician, specializing in combinatorics and number theory. He is an assistant professor at Columbia University.
Early life and education
Sawhney grew up in Commack, New York. While attending Commack High School, Sawhney competed in the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO), and participated in MIT PRIMES.[1] In 2016, for his research in graph theory through MIT PRIMES, he was named a semifinalist in the Intel Science Talent Search[2] and won an award at the International Science and Engineering Fair.[3]
Sawhney attended the University of Pennsylvania for one year before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied mathematics and computer science.[1] He received an honorable mention in the Putnam Competition in 2016, 2018, and 2019.[1] In 2020, he was awarded a Churchill Scholarship for further study in mathematics at Cambridge University, after which he returned to MIT for doctoral studies. With his frequent collaborator Ashwin Sah, he received an honorable mention for the Morgan Prize for undergraduate research in 2020,[4] and won the Morgan Prize in 2021.[5] He completed his PhD in 2024, supervised by Yufei Zhao.[6]
Career
At MIT, Sawhney was noted for his productive collaboration with fellow student Ashwin Sah in the fields of combinatorics and number theory. Sah and Sawhney each attended MIT for undergraduate and doctoral studies between 2017 and 2024. During that time, they co-authored more than 50 papers,[7] on topics such as Ramsey theory,[8] Steiner systems,[9] subspace designs,[10] and Szemerédi's theorem.[7]
In 2024, Sawhney collaborated with Ben Green to prove that, for any n ≡ 0, 4 (mod 6), there are infinitely many prime numbers of the form p2 + nq2, where p and q are themselves constrained to be prime numbers. The case n = 4 resolved a conjecture made by John Friedlander and Henryk Iwaniec in 2018.[11]
Sawhney was awarded a Clay Research Fellowship in 2024,[6] and a Packard Fellowship in 2025.[12] He became a tenure-track assistant professor of mathematics at Columbia University in 2024. He went on leave from Columbia in 2026 to join the artificial intelligence company OpenAI as a mathematician.[13]
In 2025, Sawhney and Mark Sellke used GPT-5, a large language model developed by OpenAI, to search the literature on several conjectures made by Paul Erdős in combinatorial number theory.[13][14] In 2026, Sawhney and Sellke used GPT-5 to find a counterexample to Erdős's conjecture on unit distance graphs.[15] GPT-5 provided a method to construct n points in the plane from which Ω(n1+ε) pairs of points are unit distance apart, for some ε > 0.[16] A team of mathematicians simplified the argument and computed an explicit lower bound for the exponent ε to be 6 × 10−38; Will Sawin subsequently improved the exponent to ε ≈ 0.014.[16] The construction is motivated by algebraic number theory, in particular the Golod–Shafarevich theorem, and involves high-dimensional lattices arising from CM-fields.[16] Timothy Gowers hailed the result as "a milestone in AI mathematics".[17]
References
- 1 2 3 Mongo, Julia (January 30, 2020). "Mehtaab Sawhney named 2020 Churchill Scholar". MIT News. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ "Intel STS 2016 semifinalists". Society for Science. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ "Intel ISEF 2016 Grand Award winners". Society for Science. May 13, 2016. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ "Nina Zubrilina to receive the 2020 Morgan Prize". Mathematical Association of America. November 20, 2019. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ "Ashwin Sah and Mehtaab Sawhney receive 2021 Morgan Prize". American Mathematical Society. October 29, 2020. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - 1 2 "Mehtaab Sawhney". Clay Mathematics Institute. July 1, 2024. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - 1 2 Sloman, Leila (August 5, 2024). "Grad students find inevitable patterns in big sets of numbers". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ Hartnett, Kevin (November 30, 2020). "Undergraduate math student pushes frontier of graph theory". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ Sloman, Leila (July 14, 2022). "Hypergraphs reveal solution to 50-year-old problem". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
- ↑ Cepelewicz, Jordana (April 12, 2023). "Mathematicians find hidden structure in a common type of space". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ Howlett, Joseph (December 11, 2024). "Mathematicians uncover a new way to count prime numbers". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ "The David and Lucile Packard Foundation announces the 2025 Class of Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering". David and Lucile Packard Foundation. October 15, 2025. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - 1 2 Howlett, Joseph (February 12, 2026). "Is AI on the precipice of revolutionizing math? It depends". Scientific American. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ "Early experiments in accelerating science with GPT-5". OpenAI. November 20, 2025. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ↑ Howlett, Joseph (May 21, 2026). "OpenAI announces AI's biggest math breakthrough yet". Scientific American. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - 1 2 3 Sawin, Will (May 20, 2026). "An explicit lower bound for the unit distance problem". arXiv:2605.20579 [math.CO].
- ↑ Milmo, Dan; Sample, Ian (May 21, 2026). "OpenAI makes breakthrough on 80-year-old maths problem". The Guardian. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)