Semantic Search over 9 Million Mathematical Theorems
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Abstract (arXiv)
Searching for mathematical results remains difficult: most existing tools retrieve entire papers, while mathematicians and theorem-proving agents often seek a specific theorem, lemma, or proposition that answers a query. While semantic search has seen rapid progress, its behavior on large, highly technical corpora such as research-level mathematical theorems remains poorly understood. In this work, we introduce and study semantic theorem retrieval at scale over a unified corpus of 9.2 million theorem statements extracted from arXiv and seven other sources, representing the largest publicly available corpus of human-authored, research-level theorems. We represent each theorem with a short natural-language description as a retrieval representation and systematically analyze how representation context, language model choice, embedding model, and prompting strategy affect retrieval quality. On a curated evaluation set of theorem-search queries written by professional mathematicians, our approach substantially improves both theorem-level and paper-level retrieval compared to existing baselines, demonstrating that semantic theorem search is feasible and effective at web scale. The project page, search tool, dataset, REST API, and MCP server are available at theoremsearch.com.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 23 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2026.
Builds on
23 of 56 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.
7 papers.
- 2026LemmaBench: A Live, Research-Level Benchmark to Evaluate LLM Capabilities in Mathematicscited by 7
- 2026TheoremGraph: Bridging Formal and Informal Mathematicscited by 4
- 2026Matlas: A Semantic Search Engine for Mathematicscited by 3
- 2026RL-Index: Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval Index Reasoningcited by 2
- 2026Albilich: Steerable Proof-State Orchestration for LLM-Based Mathematical Research with CAS Integrationcited by 1
- 2026Does My Embedding Reflect That A = B? Evaluating Mathematical Equivalence in Embedding Modelscited by 0
- 2026Beyond Correctness: Toward Automated Novelty Verification with Lean 4cited by 0
- 2026Beyond Correctness: Toward Automated Novelty Verification with Lean 42 Aug 2026
- 2026Albilich: Steerable Proof-State Orchestration for LLM-Based Mathematical Research with CAS Integration30 Jul 2026
- 2026TheoremGraph: Bridging Formal and Informal Mathematics24 Jun 2026
- 2026Does My Embedding Reflect That A = B? Evaluating Mathematical Equivalence in Embedding Models22 Jun 2026
- 2026RL-Index: Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval Index Reasoning15 Jun 2026
- 2026Matlas: A Semantic Search Engine for Mathematics19 Apr 2026
- 2026LemmaBench: A Live, Research-Level Benchmark to Evaluate LLM Capabilities in Mathematics27 Feb 2026
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- 2023math-PVS: A Large Language Model Framework to Map Scientific Publications to PVS Theories
- 2025DRIFT: Decompose, Retrieve, Illustrate, then Formalize Theorems
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