English

A Counterexample to the Gaussian Completely Monotone Conjecture

Probability 2026-05-13 v1 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

We provide an explicit probability measure on R\mathbb{R} for which the fifth time derivative of the entropy along the heat flow is positive at some time. This disproves the Gaussian completely monotone (GCM) conjecture (Cheng-Geng '15) and therefore also the Gaussian optimality conjecture (McKean '66) and the entropy power conjecture (Toscani '15). Our proof also implies the existence of a log-concave probability measure on R\mathbb{R} for which the GCM conjecture fails at some order. The explicit counterexample was found by GPT-5.5 Pro.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.11656,
  title  = {A Counterexample to the Gaussian Completely Monotone Conjecture},
  author = {Yuzhou Gu and Mark Sellke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.11656},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:06:48.056Z