Crazy News

I learned today that the math lecturer who taught my calculus course my freshman year at Tufts, Yitang (Tom) Zhang, is giving a talk at Harvard where he will present a proof of an astounding result in number theory: that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers p,q where p-q is less than 70,000,000. This is *big* news in the Math community, and it not only came from the guy who taught my calculus course. It comes from a guy who has been a non-tenured *lecturer* at the University of New Hampshire the past couple of decades with only two other publications to his name since 1985. Apparently word has already leaked out that the proof has survived multiple peer review and contains no errors (I would post links but am doing this on my IPhone, which can't do that). Anyway, my deepest congrats to Zhang. He took the road less traveled...and apparently now he's won. Awesome. Just awesome. And a reminder that dogged persistence can pay off.

Comments

[Dave]

"infinitely many pairs of prime numbers p,q where p-q is less than 70,000,000..." like what is an example of what you mean?

[Marcus Arvan]

Dave: I have no clue! I'm not a mathematician, and don't know a wit about number theory. But it's a very big deal in the math community. You might want to check out Peter Woit's post on it over at his blog "Not Even Wrong" (he's a mathematics professor at Columbia). He has a link to a lot of stories and discussions on it over there. There's also a post to a story on it over at NewAPPS.

[anonymous grad student]

Dave: the following are all examples: (3,13), (13, 27), (7, 41), (11, 257), (607, 1151), (5, 4729). Pairs of prime numbers where the difference between the two numbers is less than 70 million. The discovery is important because it brings us much closer to a proof of the twin prime conjecture, which says that there are infinitely many primes, p, where p+2 is also a prime. Zhang's proof shows that there are infinitely many primes, p, where p+n is also a prime, n<7million.