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Chinese doctor stuns maths world by cracking decades-old problem using ChatGPT
Jin Shanmu, a Beijing-based neurosurgeon, was trying to solve a problem related to brain ultrasounds. Instead, he made mathematical history
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Xinmei Shen
Published: 10:00am, 14 Aug 2026
When Beijing-based neurosurgeon Jin Shanmu pulled up a chair at his computer, he was not looking to make mathematical history. He was simply trying to crack a problem related to brain ultrasounds
Instead, the self-taught maths enthusiast, with help from OpenAI’s latest flagship artificial intelligence (AI) model, solved a two-decade-old mathematical puzzle that had frustrated experts around the world since 2004.
Jin, a postdoctoral researcher and resident at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, managed to prove Crouzeix’s conjecture, a problem in numerical linear algebra
His tool? A 16-hour autonomous run on GPT-5.6-Sol, operating on the ChatGPT Work platform
Proposed by French mathematician Michel Crouzeix, the conjecture posits that the norm of applying any function to a matrix is no larger than twice the function’s maximum value on that matrix’s numerical range
While abstract, it has long been an intriguing problem in matrix analysis – a field Jin stumbled into while undertaking research on transcranial ultrasounds
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