§ 1 · Prior work
The examiner
Erdős wrote roughly 1,500 papers with more than 500 collaborators, the most connected body of work in mathematics.4 He owned no house, no car, and one suitcase. He arrived at colleagues’ doors with the line: “My brain is open.”
He priced hard problems in cash because the price carried information.5 Mathematicians still measure their distance from him by Erdős number. The machines now working through his problem list are, in effect, applying for a number of their own. ∎
“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.”Alfréd Rényi · the most famous thing Erdős never said, but lived.
Erdős vocabulary
- epsilon
- a child. From ε, an arbitrarily small quantity.
- the SF
- God, the “Supreme Fascist”: keeper of the best proofs, hider of socks and passports.
- The Book
- where the SF keeps the perfect proof of every theorem. “You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book.”
- to preach
- to give a mathematics lecture.
- noise
- music, other than classical.
- to die
- to stop doing mathematics.
- to leave
- to die.
§ 2 · Partial progress
The record
Since 2024, erdosproblems.com has become an unofficial leaderboard for machine mathematics: 1,217 catalogued problems, 548 settled, 200 checked line by line in Lean.6 The AI ledger credits more than twenty systems with primary contributions to 207 problems; 74 are full solutions.7
The labs have moved constants, found proofs, made public mistakes, and closed open questions. They have not funded one statue. ∎
| Laboratory | Money, 2026 | Erdős record | Statues funded |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | $852B valuation | 201 ledger contributions, 61 full solutions; disproved the 1946 unit distance conjecture | 0 |
| Google DeepMind | ~$185B AI capex | Aletheia’s Lean-checked solution to #1051; nine more via AlphaProof Nexus; 700 problems screened | 0 |
| Anthropic | $965B valuation | 27 ledger contributions, 8 full solutions; independent unit distance proof
Paper trail
|
0 |
| Harmonic | $1.45B valuation | Aristotle: 199 ledger entries, 17 full solutions; formalized #728
Paper trail
|
0 |
| ByteDance | ≤$70B AI capex | Seed Prover: new proof logged on #379
Paper trail
|
0 |
| xAI | ~$18B in GPUs | Grok: one ledger entry, #524 | 0 |
| Multiscalar | two founders, London | Fields System: full solution to #690 | 0 |
| DeepSeek | $5.6M a run, famously | DeepThink: one attempt logged; it was wrong | 0 |
| Alibaba | $53B 3-yr AI pledge | Qwen: ranked corroborator on ErdosBench, a third-party Erdős-style benchmark | 0 |
| Meta AI | $1.5T market cap | public critique of OpenAI's claim
Paper trail
|
0 |
|
Ledger / formalization tailAxiom Math / AxiomProver – Logical Intelligence / Aleph Prover – UlamAI – Math Inc / Gauss – Rethlas – ProofCouncil – Principia Math – Trellis – Numina – Archivara – Lean FRO
Benchmark / adjacentMoonshot / Kimi – Z.ai / Zhipu / GLM – MiniMax – Amazon – Apple – Microsoft Research – Mistral – NVIDIA – Thinking Machines – Shanghai AI Lab – Morph Labs – Sakana – Preferred Networks – NAVER – LG AI Research – Upstage – Kakao
No public Erdős tie foundSafe Superintelligence – Reflection AI – Perplexity – Cohere – Baidu / ERNIE – Tencent / Hunyuan – 01.AI / Yi – StepFun – Huawei / Noah / PanGu – SenseTime / SenseNova – iFLYTEK / Spark – Baichuan AI – Xiaomi / MiMo – Samsung Research / Gauss – SK Telecom / A.X – TAIDE – AI2 – Lighthouz AI
Broader model-list labsAI21 Labs – IBM – Writer – G42 – Inflection AI – Magic – Technology Innovation Institute – MBZUAI – Stability AI – Character.ai – Cursor – Cognition – Physical Intelligence – Reka AI – Databricks ∎
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§ 3 · Proposed construction
To be designed by AI
The statue should be designed the way the labs already claim progress in mathematics: models propose, people verify.16 Every funding laboratory may put its models on the brief. A jury of mathematicians and sculptors judges blind. Human hands build the winner.
Budapest decides the site. The street outside the Erdős Center would work. So would City Park, where a teenage Erdős traded problems near the statue of Anonymous.17 The important thing is simple: Erdős belongs in the city’s public memory, not only in databases, prizes, and anecdotes. ∎
§ 4 · The prize
What it costs to close
A serious public statue, with plinth, site work, and installation, likely costs $150,000 to $500,000.18 That is not a budget line for a frontier lab; it is a rounding error. The companies on the scoreboard above will spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI this year; Alphabet’s projected spend alone passes the price of the statue roughly every ninety seconds.19
There is precedent for private monuments to scientists, and for tech money funding public statues.20 There is no precedent for an AI laboratory funding one. That is the point. Anything raised beyond the bronze endows prizes for Erdős problems still open. ∎
For individuals. A public tranche opens with the domain.
Named in the acknowledgments and cast into the plinth in small type.
Founding funder. Named plainly and permanently on the plinth.
Close Problem № 0.
If you fund, build, or run a laboratory in this testbed, one email starts the statue.
fund@erdosstatue.comThis inbox is read by a person, not a model. The status at the top of this page flips to SOLVED on the day the statue is unveiled in Budapest.
§ 5 · Correspondence