Millennium Prize Problems in Lean 4

This repository contains Lean 4 formulations of the seven Millennium Prize Problems described by the Clay Mathematics Institute. It focuses on the problem statements and the mathematics needed to express them, not on claiming solutions.

Getting started

lake exe cache get   # Mathlib build cache
lake build           # builds the statements (`Problems`) and the checks (`Tests`)
python3 scripts/clay_refs.py verify

The second command checks the Lean development. The third verifies the local copies of the official Clay PDFs. The same three steps run in CI on every push and pull request.

The seven problems

Problems/Registry.lean records the same information as checked Lean metadata, including the status of each statement.

How to claim a solution

A solution is a sorry-free proof of one of the propositions in the table, using only the standard axioms (propext, Classical.choice, Quot.sound; check with #print axioms).

• Riemann, Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer, Poincaré. Each file ends with a placeholder theorem clay_prize_* whose body is sorry. Replace the body.
• P versus NP and Navier–Stokes. These problems ask which of several alternatives holds, so the alternatives are exposed as separate propositions and there is no placeholder. There is deliberately no aggregate declaration either: the disjunction of the alternatives is a classical tautology, and an inductive type with one constructor per alternative is inhabited by classical case analysis. Both facts are compiled in Tests/AggregateTargets.lean, and the Navier–Stokes disjunction is proved outright in Tests/NavierStokes/AggregateIsTrivial.lean (zero force plus the scaling symmetry of the equations, no fluid dynamics).
• Hodge and Yang–Mills. Not valid targets until the statements are rewritten; see the next section.

Known incomplete statements

A review in September 2026 (with an independent contribution by Kevin Buzzard, PR #9) found that two of the formal statements are interface sketches whose data are not pinned down by the stated properties. Both files carry a warning at the top, both are marked statement_incomplete in the registry, and their former sorry placeholders have been removed.

• Hodge. Every SmoothProjectiveVariety ℂ in the repository has no complex points, because points must be in bijection with the plain Scheme hom-set Spec ℂ ⟶ X and also inject into a finite projective space, so ClayHodge is vacuously true (Tests/Hodge/StatementIsVacuous.lean, contributed by Kevin Buzzard). Independently, the cycle-class map is free data: setting it to zero preserves every "canonical" anchor, so ClayHodge would become false as soon as the first defect were repaired (Tests/Hodge/CycleClassUnconstrained.lean). A faithful statement needs the analytic topology on X(ℂ), a defined Hodge decomposition and cycle-class map, and the rational–complex comparison isomorphism, none of which exist in Mathlib.
• Yang–Mills. The quantum-field-theory data are not tied to Yang–Mills theory or to relativity: the gauge field stores connection and curvature independently, the Lie algebra has no bracket, the Poincaré group is an arbitrary group unrelated to the Hamiltonian, and the "unbounded" physical Hamiltonian is tied to the spectrum of a bounded operator. The existence statement can therefore be satisfied by a two-dimensional toy model. (Until September 2026 the vacuum-uniqueness axiom was also contradictory, which made the theory structure uninhabited; that slip is fixed.)

Contributions that replace these sketches with faithful statements are very welcome; they are substantial projects, not patches.

Formalization scope

The statements follow the Clay PDFs included in this repository. Some subjects require explicit interfaces for mathematics that is not yet available directly in Mathlib:

• Navier–Stokes represents Fefferman's four cases (A)–(D) directly. Fields are smooth on the closed half-space ℝ³ × [0,∞); the equations and the derivative bounds are imposed on the open half-space t > 0, because the ambient derivative used in the equations is not meaningful on the boundary. The pressure-periodicity erratum is included.
• P versus NP uses a concrete finite-alphabet Turing-machine model and Cook's verifier definition, with certificates that are strings over a finite alphabet.
• Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer packages the analytic continuation of the L-series as explicit data; the target is existential in that data, so a proof must also supply the continuation and a finite rank.
• Riemann is equivalent to Mathlib's RiemannHypothesis; Poincaré is equivalent to the shape of Mathlib's proof_wanted statement.
• Hodge and Yang–Mills are axiomatic sketches, see above.

The detailed choices and related declarations are listed in Problems/Registry.lean and documented inside the corresponding Lean files.

Tests

The Tests library is built by lake build and holds compiled facts about the statements: sanity checks that must keep holding (equivalences with Mathlib statements, axiom audits, inhabitation of data types), and regression witnesses that show why certain formulations are not targets. A regression witness is expected to stop compiling when the statement it exposes is fixed.

Repository layout

History of statement fixes

• 2026-04: Navier–Stokes vacuous-domain loophole closed after issue #4.
• 2026-06: Navier–Stokes aggregate disjunction removed after issue #5 (it was reintroduced in July and removed again in September).
• 2026-09: independent review. Smoothness order fixed to C^∞ (PR #7); Yang–Mills locality direction fixed (PR #8); Navier–Stokes equations moved to the open half-space; P versus NP certificate encoding fixed (every language was in NP); Yang–Mills vacuum-uniqueness axiom fixed; Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer auxiliary formulations with empty data types removed or weakened; Hodge and Yang–Mills demoted to statement_incomplete; Tests library and CI added.

References

• Clay Mathematics Institute: Millennium Problems
• Lean 4
• Mathlib documentation

Contributing

Contributions that improve the accuracy of the statements, replace temporary mathematical interfaces with native Mathlib constructions, add tests, or provide formal proofs are welcome. Statement changes should come with a test in Tests/ showing that the new statement is not trivially provable or refutable.