Lauren K. Williams received an AB from Harvard University and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2009 to 2018, prior to returning to Harvard University, where she is currently the Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics. Williams has received various honors, including a MacArthur fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and an NSF Career Grant. While her main research area is algebraic combinatorics (including total positivity and cluster algebras), her work is connected to shallow water waves (via soliton solutions of the KP equation), traffic flow and protein synthesis (the asymmetric simple exclusion process), and scattering amplitudes in high-energy physics. She is one of the editors of First Proof, which has been benchmarking the ability of AI models to create mathematical proofs.

First Proof provides objective, up-to-date assessments of AI models’ ability to prove specified mathematical statements. This talk will review findings from the project’s first two problem batches and outline plans for its next phase.