From Expert-Guided Proof Search to Automated Open-Problem Solving

Abstract

Large language models are increasingly contributing to mathematical research, where progress often depends on efficient proof search, incremental improvements and careful verification. We describe Bolzano, a multi-agent open-source system that uses parallel prover agents with a verifier agent and maintains a human-readable research state. Initial manual use on expert-selected problems yielded 8 results whose proofs were checked by domain experts. Motivated by these case studies, we ran Bolzano without problem-specific human guidance on about 3,800 open problems extracted from four sets of papers, solving about 200 open problems. One experiment used papers accepted to STOC 2026, a top conference in theoretical computer science. There, we answered four questions raised in the papers, as confirmed by their authors.