[harshreality]

You're arguing things I didn't argue. The top-level comment wasn't about how to do some math problem that Sonnet or even Opus is capable of; it was about math book recommendations, and I was specifically mentioning that even though the LLM won't understand the math pedagogy behind why one book might be better than another, it's trained on enough commentary that it will give good recommendations (or anti-recommendations) for any well-known textbooks.

My experience with people who have LLM subscriptions of any kind is that they use them all the time and would immediately ask an LLM that kind of question, rather than asking on a web forum that's not even dedicated to math. So I think it's a fair presumption that someone asking that question doesn't have access to the best commercial models.

On the largely irrelevant question of what math LLMs can do, although Opus may do better, Sonnet can follow procedures sometimes but not consistently. It has blind spots and can't scale procedures; beyond certain numbers or dimensions or problem complexity, it just guesses (wrong). And those limits are quite low. If you want 2 simple examples:

4294967297*1331

Invert this matrix: m=[1 0 5 0 3 7; 2 3 0 3 3 2; 1 0 1 1 0 1; 3 5 3 5 1 2; 2 4 3 2 1 5; 1 0 5 2 1 5]

LLMs follow procedures, but whimsically. Better LLMs will be less whimsical, but they still won't be fully competent unless they digest questions into more formal terms and then interface with an engine like Wolfram.