Axiom

NASA has asked industry to submit plans for next-generation space stations as it prepares for the eventual retirement of the International Space Station. The request signals the agency's push to hand over low Earth orbit operations to commercial operators. NASA has previously funded private station concepts from companies such as Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and Vast, and the move is being watched closely by the space policy community.

A mathematician examines how OpenAI's models handle the Partition Principle, a statement in set theory about splitting sets into equivalence classes that is independent of the standard axioms. The piece uses the topic to reflect on whether large language models can do genuine mathematics, and what their successes and failures on deep foundational questions reveal about the field.