Artificial intelligence’s ability to sift through large amounts of data is helping us tackle one of the most difficult unsolved problems in mathematics.

Yang-Hui He at City, University of London, and his colleagues are using the help of machine learning to better understand the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. This is one of the seven fiendishly difficult Millennium Prize Problems , each of which has a million-dollar reward on offer for the first correct solution.

The conjecture describes solutions to equations known as elliptic curves, equations in …