The field of mechanistic interpretability is well-suited to collaborative projects between mathematicians and AI researchers. This work describes one such project. We trained a small transformer to learn the language of the Coxeter group affine A2, best known as the symmetries of the tiling of the Euclidean plane by equilateral triangles. We then formulated and proved a word-theoretic conjecture about affine A2 after observing the attention patterns of the trained model.
Discovering continuous symmetries directly from differential-equation data can reveal geometric structure for model reduction and scientific machine learning without symbolic determining equations or a closed-form representation of the governing system. We formulate intrinsic Lie point-symmetry discovery as an operator-theoretic problem on sampled jet-space data. Admissible generators are identified from a sampled determining operator and separated from redundant, solution-dependent, and geometrically trivial directions. The framework combines prolongation, sequential subspace restrictions, and a fixed nonlinear dictionary linear in trainable coefficients. A rank-stabilization preflight test diagnoses systems whose represented intrinsic symmetry algebra does not stabilize under dictionary refinement. On a controlled differential-equation benchmark with an analytically known 11-dimensional represented intrinsic symmetry algebra, the method recovers the complete represented generator set, reproduces its Lie-bracket structure to numerical precision, and approximates a known generator beyond the training domain. Here we show that explicit intrinsic continuous-symmetry generators can be recovered from data obtained from exact or approximate differential systems.
A finite presentation < X | R > of a finite group is called `just finite' if removing any relation from R results in a presentation for an infinite group. It has been an open question (Kourovka Notebook, Problem 21.10) whether every finite group admits such a presentation. We resolve this conjecture in the affirmative.
Our goal is to construct mathematical operations that combine indeterminism measured from quantum randomness with computational determinism so that non-mechanistic behavior is preserved in the computation. Formally, some results about operations applied to computably enumerable (c.e.) and bi-immune sets are proven here, where the objective is for the operations to preserve bi-immunity. While developing rearrangement operations on the natural numbers, we discovered that the bi-immune rearrangements generate an uncountable subgroup of the infinite symmetric group (Sym$(\mathbb{N})$) on the natural numbers $\mathbb{N}$. This new uncountable subgroup is called the bi-immune symmetric group. We show that the bi-immune symmetric group contains the finitary symmetric group on the natural numbers, and consequently is highly transitive. Furthermore, the bi-immune symmetric group is dense in Sym$(\mathbb{N})$ with respect to the pointwise convergence topology. The complete structure of the bi-immune symmetric group and its subgroups generated by one or more bi-immune rearrangements is unknown.