Prime Numbers are the Atoms of Arithmetic
May 20, 2013 6:53 PM Subscribe
Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know — someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1992 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop.Yitang Zhang has a deep interest in prime pairs and has proved something interesting about them.
In short,
His paper shows that there is some number N smaller than 70 million such that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by N. No matter how far you go into the deserts of the truly gargantuan prime numbers — no matter how sparse the primes become — you will keep finding prime pairs that differ by less than 70 million.
This post was deleted for the following reason: Double. -- jessamyn
Yeah, double, you beat me to it while I searched for the post. That thread is still open.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:57 PM on May 20, 2013
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:57 PM on May 20, 2013
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posted by hoyland at 6:56 PM on May 20, 2013