A few weeks ago the world of maths was pleasantly shocked when a hitherto largely unnoticed mathematician, Yitang Zhang, demonstrated that there are infinitely many (pairs of primes) primes at most 70,000,000 apart – ie find a prime, any prime, no matter how large, and there is another two at most 70,000,000 numbers away.
Zhang’s story is a great one – someone who loved maths so much he kept plugging away even when most other people would have given up and gotten a “proper” job. And, then, finally it all pays off with a breakthrough discovery of enormous importance.
But this his paper was published other have been working to refine his work and the latest proposal – this has been updated even since I started writing this blog minutes ago – is that there are infinitely many primes just 388,284 numbers apart.
Related articles
- “Bounded gaps between primes” by Yitang Zhang now available (aperiodical.com)
- Yitang Zhang, bounded gaps, primes as random numbers (quomodocumque.wordpress.com)
- Primes gotta stick together (aperiodical.com)
- The Bounded Gaps Between Primes Theorem has been proved (mathbabe.org)
- China’s Ramanujan finds prime number gap (thehindu.com)
- Polymath proposal: bounded gaps between primes (polymathprojects.org)
- Professor who once had to work at Subway makes math breakthrough (spacemart.com)
- Online reading seminar for Zhang’s “bounded gaps between primes” (terrytao.wordpress.com)
- Numberphiles Break Down The Twin Prime Theory In (Mostly) Plain English [Video] (geekosystem.com)
- Prime number breakthrough by unknown professor (telegraph.co.uk)
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