The Office of Justin Sun named the first confirmed recipients of the Justin Sun Prize on Sunday: Wouter van Doorn, Quanyu Tang, and Yanyang Li, recognized for contributions spanning six Erdős problems. It's the program's first batch of awards since it was set up to fund mathematics, formal verification, and AI-assisted discovery. Payouts come in USDT on TRON or USDC on Ethereum, whichever the recipient picks.
The three names on the list
Van Doorn is an independent number theorist who started researching as an undergraduate in 2010 and kept publishing after leaving academia with a master's degree. Tang is a math Ph.D. student at the University of Science and Technology of China, working across number theory, combinatorics, and AI-assisted discovery. Li is a researcher at Southeast University's School of Mathematics in Nanjing.
The three collaborated on Erdős Problem #650, pinning down exactly how many integers can always be matched to distinct multiples within a specified interval.
What the problems actually ask
Erdős problems are questions posed or popularized by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. They tend to be easy to state and hard to crack, and some have sat open for decades. The catalog, maintained by Thomas Bloom — a mathematician and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Manchester — holds more than 1,200 of them.
Van Doorn's solo contributions include computer-checkable proofs in Lean for Problems #369, #457, and #469. The first deals with consecutive integers with restricted prime factors. The second asks whether a short run of consecutive integers can collectively contain every prime in a given range. The third concerns whether reciprocals of a special class of numbers — those expressible as sums of their divisors — add to a finite total.
Tang separately resolved Problem #1044, establishing a sharp lower limit for boundary lengths of regions defined by polynomials. He also worked with Li on a wider team's solution to Problem #1196, which bounds weighted sums over sets of integers where no member divides another.
Where the AI fits in
The #650 work is a clean example of human-AI collaboration. ChatGPT helped develop the proof strategy, while Aristotle, an AI system built for mathematical reasoning, repaired a gap during Lean formalization. The researchers then simplified the argument and wrote up the final proofs and exposition themselves.
Tang was direct about what he took from it. "This experience taught me how public feedback can sharpen a research question, and how AI-assisted discovery can combine mathematical judgment, collaboration and rigorous verification," he said.
Judged on proofs, not reputations
The prize is decentralized by design, built around the idea that math should be judged on the strength, rigor, and verifiability of a proof rather than the prestige of whoever submitted it. That's a pointed stance in a field where institutional affiliation still carries a lot of weight. Van Doorn's path — out of academia since his master's, publishing independently — is exactly the sort of case the rules seem written to catch.
Justin Sun, the founder of TRON and former Permanent Representative of Grenada to the World Trade Organization, set up the program in his own name. The stated aim is to return wealth created through mathematics and technology back to mathematics. Details on the prize, its problem catalog, and recipient contributions live in the program's public GitHub repository.
These are the first confirmed awards, and the office hasn't said how many more rounds are planned or when the next batch of recipients will land.
