A trio of researchers at Babson College, the University of Missouri, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, used an idea suggested by OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol to disprove a 150-year-old conjecture in electrostatics. The paper, titled “The Maxwell Conjecture is False,” was posted to arXiv on July 29 by Philip Arathoon, Gavin Ball, and Matthew D. Kvalheim. The conjecture, formalized in 2007 by Alexandre Gabrielov, Dmitry Novikov, and Boris Shapiro, states that for n charges, if all equilibrium points are “non-degenerate,” there can be at most (n-1)² of them. The authors built a configuration of five point charges that produces at least 24 non-degenerate critical points, exceeding the conjectured maximum of (5-1)² = 16. The construction starts with three equal charges at the corners of an equilateral triangle, which has exactly four equilibrium points: one at the centre and three pushed slightly inward along each edge. The result settles a question open for over a century, which had been formalized into a specific conjecture mathematicians had been trying to crack since 2007.