Counting from Infinity: Yitang Zhang and the Twin Prime Conjecture

Overview

In April 2013, a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire submitted a paper to the Annals of Mathematics. Within weeks word spread: a little-known mathematician, with no permanent job, working in complete isolation, had made an important breakthrough toward solving the Twin Prime Conjecture. Yitang Zhang's techniques for bounding the gaps between primes soon led to rapid progress by the Polymath Group, and a further innovation by James Maynard.

Details

Cast

Zhang Yitang

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Erica Klarreich

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Andrew Granville

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Terence Tao

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James Maynard

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Kannan Soundararajan

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Jacob Chi

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Peter Sarnak

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David Eisenbud

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Lin Chang

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Juliet Chi

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Julius Chi

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Enrico Bombieri

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Edward Hinson

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Wenhua Qian

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Yaling Sun

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Kenneth Ribet

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Nicholas M. Katz

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Daniel Alan Goldston

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