Written by: Rajeeva Laxman Karandikar7 min readNew DelhiAug 3, 2026 06:38 AM IST First published on: Aug 3, 2026 at 06:37 AM ISTRecently, mathematician Levent Alpöge announced on X that he had found a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture — a problem posed by Ott-Heinrich Keller in 1939. He credited his collaborator on the discovery: Claude Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest AI model.The Jacobian conjecture is probably too technical to explain in a newspaper column (an interested reader can readily find a precise statement on the internet). For Indians, it is worth knowing that Prof Shreeram Abhyankar, founder of the Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana in Pune, was interested in this question and popularised it in his lectures.