PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Mehtaab Sawhney

Mehtaab Sawhney is a mathematician at OpenAI who works on combinatorics and number theory and on using AI models to attack open problems in mathematics. After a first year at the University of Pennsylvania, he transferred to MIT, shared the 2021 Morgan Prize with Ashwin Sah, and completed a PhD under Yufei Zhao in 2024. As a Clay Research Fellow and assistant professor at Columbia, he proved with Ben Green in 2024 that infinitely many primes have the form p² + 4q² with p and q prime. In 2025, he received a Packard Fellowship and used GPT-5 with Mark Sellke to search the literature on Erdős problems. He joined OpenAI in 2026 and in May 2026 helped present an internal OpenAI model's disproof of Erdős's unit distance conjecture.

Born
1998
Works
108
Citations
337
h-index
9
Badges

Years link to their sources. Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2016–2020

    A Churchill Scholar from MIT

    He grows up in Commack, New York, competes in the USA Mathematical Olympiad, and in 2016 becomes an Intel Science Talent Search semifinalist for graph theory research done through MIT PRIMES. After a first year at the University of Pennsylvania, he transfers to MIT, where he does most of his research in combinatorics with Yufei Zhao in the Department of Mathematics. In January 2020, as he finishes a BS in mathematics with a minor in computer science, he is named a 2020 Churchill Scholar for a year of Part III study at Churchill College, Cambridge.

  2. 2020–2021

    A shared Morgan Prize

    He and Ashwin Sah receive an honorable mention for the Morgan Prize for undergraduate research in 2020 and win the 2021 Morgan Prize, the first time the prize goes jointly to more than one recipient. The prize committee cites their contributions to extremal graph theory, additive combinatorics, Ramsey theory, random graphs and random matrix theory.

  3. 2020–2024

    A doctorate with Yufei Zhao

    He begins a PhD at MIT in 2020 and completes it under Yufei Zhao in 2024; between 2017 and 2024, he and Sah coauthor more than 50 papers. With Kwan, Sah and Simkin, he proves a 1973 Erdős conjecture on high-girth Steiner triple systems, and with Jain and Sah he establishes sharp estimates for the singularity probability of discrete random matrices.

  4. 2024

    Clay Fellow at Columbia

    In January 2024, the Clay Mathematics Institute names him a Clay Research Fellow for five years beginning in July 2024. He becomes a tenure-track assistant professor of mathematics at Columbia University in 2024.

  5. 2024

    Primes of the form p² + 4q²

    In 2024, he and Ben Green of the University of Oxford prove that there are infinitely many primes of the form p² + 4q² with p and q prime, settling a 2018 conjecture of John Friedlander and Henryk Iwaniec. Their proof draws on Gowers norms, a tool from a very different area of mathematics.

  6. 2025

    A Packard Fellowship

    He receives a 2025 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, announced by Columbia's mathematics department in October 2025. His research isolates structured and random behavior in problems across combinatorics, probability and number theory.

  7. 2025

    Erdős problems with GPT-5

    In 2025, he and Mark Sellke use OpenAI's GPT-5 to search the literature on conjectures by Paul Erdős in combinatorial number theory. In November 2025, he coauthors “Early science acceleration experiments with GPT-5,” a set of case studies that includes four new mathematical results verified by the human authors.

  8. Since 2026

    Mathematician at OpenAI

    He takes leave from Columbia in 2026 to join OpenAI as a mathematician. In May 2026, an internal OpenAI model disproves Erdős's unit distance conjecture with a construction from algebraic number theory, and he is one of four team members who present the result in an OpenAI video with Tim Gowers. In September 2026, he and Mark Sellke discuss OpenAI model results in sphere packing and the construction of a non-sofic group on the a16z Show.

Career

  1. Since 2026OpenAIMathematician
  2. 2024–2026Columbia UniversityAssistant professor of mathematics

Education

  1. 2024Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPhD
  2. 2020Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBS in mathematics
  3. From 2020University of CambridgePart III study
  4. 2016University of PennsylvaniaUndergraduate student

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Discrepancy minimization via a self-balancing walk2021 · ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) · 21 citations
  2. Singularity of discrete random matrices2021 · Geometric and Functional Analysis · 19 citations
  3. The number of independent sets in an irregular graph2018 · 17 citations
  4. A reverse Sidorenko inequality2020 · Inventiones mathematicae · 16 citations
  5. Large deviations in random latin squares2022 · Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society · 12 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 21 October 2026.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Mehtaab Sawhney. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Mehtaab Sawhney. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  3. Among employers with 30+ full-time cases, OpenAI leads primary technical role H-1B pay at $310,000, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft file 57% of all casesIncludes OpenAI. Across 440,669 certified US H-1B filings from 44 employers (FY2020–FY2026), OpenAI leads primary technical role base pay at $310,000 and xAI leads overall base pay at $290,000.
  4. 22 of 133 people shaping AI with a former OpenAI role now work at AnthropicIncludes OpenAI. Our estimates of where OpenAI recruits came from and where 133 people with former OpenAI roles work now, including the companies and labs they founded.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Mehtaab Sawhney yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Mehtaab Sawhney - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. Mehtaab Sawhney named 2020 Churchill Scholar | MIT News news.mit.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Ashwin Sah and Mehtaab Sawhney win the Morgan Prize yufeizhao.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Mehtaab Sawhney - Clay Mathematics Institute claymath.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. 2024 Clay Research Fellows - Clay Mathematics Institute claymath.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. Mehtaab Sawhney math.columbia.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  7. Mathematicians Uncover a New Way to Count Prime Numbers | Quanta Magazine quantamagazine.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  8. Professor Mehtaab Sawhney awarded 2025 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering math.columbia.edu. Checked 20 October 2026.
  9. [2511.16072] Early science acceleration experiments with GPT-5 arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  10. Amazing: Erdős’ Unit Distance Problem was Disproved! It was achieved by AI! | Combinatorics and more gilkalai.wordpress.com. Checked 20 October 2026.
  11. OpenAI Researchers on the Future of Mathematical Reasoning | Andreessen Horowitz a16z.com. Checked 20 October 2026.