The news of the AI's medal win was published by thousands of media outlets and chosen as one of the year's biggest scientific breakthroughs by the journal Science. And this is where the story starts to get complicated. Because the news is a lie.
Faltings was awarded the prize for work proving central results in the theory of algebraic equations linking whole numbers together. The prize highlights Faltings's work in 1983 on the theory of Diophantine equations, which are equations involving sums and powers of unknown numbers for which the solutions have to be rational - meaning they can be written as a fraction of two whole numbers, or integers.
For more than two millennia, mathematicians have produced a growing heap of pi equations in their ongoing search for methods to calculate pi faster and faster. The pile of equations has now grown into the thousands, and algorithms now can generate an infinitude. Each discovery has arrived alone, as a fragment, with no obvious connection to the others. But now, for the first time, centuries of pi formulas have been shown to be part of a unified, formerly hidden structure.
In the weeks leading up to September 1891, mathematician Georg Cantor prepared an ambush. For years he had sparred - philosophically, mathematically and emotionally - with his formidable rival Leopold Kronecker, one of Germany's most influential mathematicians. Kronecker thought that mathematics should deal only with whole numbers and proofs built from them and therefore rejected Cantor's study of infinity. "God made the integers," Kronecker once said. "All else is the work of man."