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Nikolas Rieke

Publications and source records attributed to Nikolas Rieke.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Benchmarks in Leipzig

Between April 1 and May 15, 2026, a group of 49 mathematicians compiled a dataset of research-level mathematics questions with known answers. Most of the work was done during the 3-day workshop *Benchmarks in Leipzig* with 35 participants at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. We present the resulting collection of 100 questions. We evaluated these questions in three stages: a single attempt by five state-of-the-art LLMs, followed by a 20-runs-per-model evaluation with three of these models, and finally a 3-run attempt with two heavy-thinking models. After Stage 1, 41 questions remained completely unsolved; after Stage 2, this count dropped to 16; and we concluded Stage 3 with only 2 unsolved questions. This demonstrates that the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs are becoming impressive.

math.HO

The Euler Stratification for $\mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^n$

We study the Euler characteristic of a hypersurface in $(\mathbb{C}^*)^2 \times (\mathbb{C}^*)^n$ defined by a polynomial whose monomial support corresponds to lattice points in $\Delta_1 \times \Delta_1 \times \Delta_n$ as the coefficients of the defining polynomial vary. Each member of this hypersurface family corresponds to a three-way independence model from algebraic statistics, and the (signed) Euler characteristic is equal to the maximum likelihood degree (ML degree) of the model. We show in the case of $\Delta_1 \times \Delta_1 \times \Delta_1$ this Euler characteristic depends only on the vanishing patterns of the factors of the principal $A$-determinant, but this fails for $\Delta_1 \times \Delta_1 \times \Delta_n$ with $n \geq 2$. We prove that, for all $n\geq 1$, all positive integers up to the maximum possible ML degree can be realized as the Euler characteristic. Furthermore, we completely determine the Euler stratification for $\mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1$ and provide partial information for $\mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^1 \times \mathbb{P}^2$.

math.AG

Vertex distortion detects the unknot

The first two authors introduced vertex distortion and showed that the vertex distortion of the unknot is trivial. It was conjectured that the vertex distortion of a knot is trivial if and only if the knot is trivial. We will use Denne-Sullivan's bound on Gromov distortion to bound the vertex distortion of nontrivial lattice knots. We will then conclude that trivial vertex distortion implies the unknot, proving the conjecture. Additionally, the first conjecture in vertex distortion's debut article is proven and a vertex distortion calculator is given.

math.GT