A man not regarded as a "big name" in mathematician circles just recently became an overnight math rock star.
Annals of Mathematics told University of New Hampshire (UNH) mathematician Yitang Zhang, who goes by Tom, on May 9 that his paper was accepted to be published in the prestigious journal. In the essay, Zhang, a former employee of Subway, took an important step toward solving a very old, very complicated problem in math, reported the Boston Globe.
Soon after the paper's publication, Zhang received an invitation to speak at Harvard University, but Zhang had to wrap up the semester.
"Just come as early as possible," Zhang recalled to the Boston Globe being told by a Harvard representative.
So, as early as he could, the 50-something-year-old soon found himself in front of a group of Harvard mathematicians, giving a lecture on the problem that has stumped mathematicians for centuries. The problem was twin prime numbers.
"Twin primes" is an oddity among prime numbers, which can only be divided by themselves and one. Theses prime numbers often come in pairs, separated by only two, like three and five, 11 and 13 and so on.
The "twin prime conjecture" is a theory that expressed that there is an infinite number of twin primes and it has never been proven.
UPI.com reported that Zhang demonstrated that there will always be a pair of primes separated from another pair, no matter how large, by less than 70 million. Even though Zhang did not prove an infinite number of primes, he did prove the distance between prime pairs does not increase to an infinite size.
"It's a steady stream of papers which tends to get you jobs," Annals of Mathematics board member Richard Taylor told The Daily Telegraph. "Maybe [Zhang] likes to think about the big problems -- and you don't solve those very often."
