Harvard physicist’s BootLoops toolkit puts AI to work across the sciences

Harvard theoretical physicist Matthew D. Schwartz took a more practical route. On October 1, 2026, he released BootLoops 1.0, an open-source toolkit built on one premise: AI works best when you give it the right kind of problem. Schwartz calls these problems “Claude-shaped” tasks. Over three months, he and his collaborators used that framing to turn out 36 manuscripts with 19 coauthors, drawn from a pool of 400 candidate problems. What BootLoops actually does BootLoops is a modular harness for scientific calculation. It sits between a researcher and a large language model, such as Anthropic’s Claude. The flagship use case is mathematical physics. The toolkit can compute 30 integrals end-to-end. Half of those, 15 integrals, reproduce results that were already known. The other 15 are new, and they include elliptic Feynman integrals. For non-physicists, Feynman integrals are the math behind how particles interact in quantum field theory. The elliptic kind are notoriously hard to evaluate. Well beyond physics The project does not stop at particle physics. BootLoops reaches into roughly 18 to 22 different fields, including ecology, population genetics and cosmology. Verification is cent...