Mathematician: Yitang Zhang, Twin Prime Conjecture Breakthru

By Xah Lee. Date:

if you haven't heard yet, there's a major breakthru in math recently. That is, about the Twin prime conjecture .

basically, the conjecture is that there are infinitely number of prime number, say p, such that p+2 is also a prime. For examples, {{3, 5}, {5, 7}, {11, 13}, {17, 19}, {29, 31}, {41, 43}, …}.

in general, one would think that as numbers gets large, the gap between prime gets larger. So, if the twin prime conjecture is true, it means the gap doesn't get larger, because there's always neighbor primes with gap of just 2.

another way to state a general version of the conjecture is that, the gaps between neighboring prime numbers does not grow to infinity.

nobody were able to prove that the gap never goes to infinity, ever since this problem is known for 150+ years.

a pretty much unknown mathematician Yitang Zhang (张益唐) (born 1955) made the breakthru.

he proved, that the gap does not tend to infinity.

mathematician Yitang Zhang twin prime
mathematician Yitang Zhang 2592×1944

Mathematicians