BCV (Bain Capital Ventures)

Begin Proof

A Mathematics , Science and Technology podcast

#21 in Mathematics · 🇺🇸 #52 in Mathematics · 🇨🇦

About the show

For the past several decades, mathematicians did roughly what they'd always done, they sat in rooms, filled chalkboards, and published papers, the day-to-day practice of research mathematics was stagnant from one generation to the next. That era is now ending. Since the beginning of this year, AI systems have disproved open conjectures, solved problems thought to be beyond reach, and synthesized results across fields that no single human could hold in their head. Begin Proof is a long-form conversation series with the people at the frontier of this shift, including the researchers building the models and the mathematicians figuring out what their work looks like next. Hosted by Slater Stich, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), where he backs early-stage founders building infrastructure and tools for data teams.

Newest episodes

Begin Proof — Noam Brown

Jun 4, 2026 44 min

Last month, an OpenAI model disproved a long-standing conjecture by Paul Erdős on the planar unit distance problem, producing a construction so intricate that verifying it took a team of external mathematicians a week. In the inaugural episode of Begin Proof, Slater Stich sits down with Noam Brown, who leads work on multi-agent reasoning and test-time compute at OpenAI, and was one of the key people behind o1, OpenAI's first public reasoning model. They talk about what the Erdős result actually means, where the models are superhuman and where they still aren't, and what working mathematicians will be doing in a few years. X Slater: https://x.com/slaterstich Noam: https://x.com/polynoamial OpenAI: https://x.com/OpenAI Bain Capital Ventures: https://x.com/BainCapVC __ LinkedIn Slater: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slater-stich-4658a849/ Noam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noam-brown-8b785b62/ OpenAI: https://www.linkedin.com/company/openai/ Bain Capital Ventures: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bain-capital-ventures/