That figures: Professor who had to work at Subway dazzles world of maths after solving centuries-old prime number riddle - Science - News - The Independent: "A university professor who was forced to work at Subway when he couldn't find a job as an academic has solved a prime number riddle that has puzzled the best mathematical brains for centuries.
Dr Yitang Zhang was enjoying the summer holiday in a friend's back garden in Colorado last year when it suddenly occurred to him that he could make a major breakthrough in the field of analytic number theory.
Prime numbers - which are only divisible by one and themselves - often come in pairs that differ by two. Five and seven, for instance, or 11 and 13. They're known as twin primes.
As numbers get larger, it becomes harder to find prime numbers. But for hundreds of years, mathematicians have believed there are an infinite number of these pairs - known as the twin prime conjecture.
While Dr Zhang could not prove that there are an infinite number of twin primes, he has found that there are an infinite number of prime pairs separated by less than 70 million. It may sound like a colossal gap, but he has essentially wrestled that figure down from infinity."
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