Euler blowup: the collaboration behind the headlines
Human direction, AI-generated arguments, and the work of making them readable.
Tristan Buckmaster · Levent Alpöge · Córdoba–Martínez-Zoroa program
Start with the question
The problem
Euler describes an ideal incompressible fluid without viscosity. Can smooth motion break down even when an applied force is smooth? Specifying the force and regularity is necessary to know which question a proof answers.
01
A research program came first
Buckmaster credits Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa with the program of constructing forced blowups. His personal collaboration with Alpöge used Claude and Codex to extend that work to smooth forcing. Their statement emphasizes that the original direction came from mathematicians. [1]
02
Checking and explaining are different tasks
Buckmaster dates the Boussinesq and Euler breakthrough to 15 August and Lean verification to 22 August. He describes the initial model-written argument as very difficult to read. The subsequent work was to understand and explain the proof, not simply to obtain a successful checker response. [1]
03
Inspect the published development
The fluid_lean repository exposes the formalization projects. Its Euler component is explicitly about smooth external forcing. Readers comparing this release with another Euler result should check the exact hypotheses in each repository rather than treating all blowup claims as interchangeable. [2][3]
Inspect the evidence
The Lean formalization
Public Lean project for smooth-forcing blowup
Start with the euler-blowup project and its README, then compare its theorem statement with the accompanying Euler manuscript. The authors report verification; this site has not independently rebuilt the project.
Open the Lean project ↗Sources & further reading
Reviewed 9 Sept 2026. X permalinks were recovered from indexed posts and linked discussions; direct X pages were not consistently accessible. They document the conversation, not proof correctness.
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- 5.Jaime Sevilla’s X thread discussing the competing accounts ↗
Commentary, not mathematical verification. The thread is also available through Rattibha.