Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Unknown mathematician proves an anlogue of the twin prime conjecture

namely that there is number N less than 70 million, such that you can find arbitrarily large prime differing by N. More from Erica Klarreich:
"Since that time, the intrinsic appeal of these conjectures has given them the status of a mathematical holy grail, even though they have no known applications. But despite many efforts at proving them, mathematicians weren’t able to rule out the possibility that the gaps between primes grow and grow, eventually exceeding any particular bound.
Now Zhang has broken through this barrier. 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."
(via J.K. Mohana Rao)

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