Mehtaab Sawhney

Mehtaab Sawhney is a mathematician specializing in combinatorics, probability, and analytic number theory. He is an assistant professor at Columbia University currently on leave to work as a mathematician at OpenAI. He is best known for breakthroughs on problems including the Erdős conjecture on high-girth Steiner triple systems, the Erdős-McKay conjecture on Ramsey graphs, and the existence of subspace designs, and in 2026 he co-authored work using GPT-5 to find a counterexample to Erdős's conjecture on unit distance graphs. He is a Clay Research Fellow and a 2025 Packard Fellow.