In the Navier-Stokes blowup work, I understand the formalization was done in 
another pass.  But it doesn’t have to be done that way, Lean could be used at 
every step or at various milestones to enforce the theorems.  There are more 
than 38k theorems across 2659 files in that work.   Code is commented and I 
find it readable.   https://github.com/openai/NavierStokesAndEuler

 

From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2026 9:57 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Circuit bending

 

Yeah, I’m not sure yet how I feel about the whole "LLMs with Lean ending math" 
thing. The impression I get is that, rather than finding *the book proof* a la 
Erdos, many of these proofs, for instance the work on odd values of the zeta 
function, are more on the dissatisfying side, like the four-color theorem. But 
idk, I haven’t been in the trenches of this, and I mostly avoid the social 
media outrage around it.

I don’t know if I understand what you’re getting at when you say, "What they 
are conveniently not mentioning is that the wander-around-and-discover-stuff 
activity is accumulating at superhuman speed in AI notebooks on behalf of goal 
directed behavior." It sounds cool, and maybe closer to what I’m hoping for, 
but idk.

Am I naive in thinking that Lean formalizations are more the targets of these 
goal-directed activities than the rails guiding discovery? It has seemed to me, 
over the last few years, that type theory ought to make a reasonable pidgin 
language between humans and LLMs. In particular, I think the process could be 
tightened up, and made less token-consumptive, by using types to guide 
compositionality.

I mean goal-directed computation in general, not just proof search: an agent 
finding a ride, comparing options, obtaining authorization to spend, and 
booking it, for example. I suspect richer types could describe the intermediate 
obligations and permissible compositions well enough to steer the agent, rather 
than merely check its output or the syntax of its tool calls.

If you’re saying that this is already mostly what’s going on, I do find that 
interesting.

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