Tag: zhang yitang

Yitang Zhang’s Santa Barbara Beach Walk

Professor Yitang Zhang is a famous Math professor who made important progress in number theory (Twin Prime Conjecture). Most strikingly, he made this progress in his fifties, which is kind of rare in the mathematical world.

Source: Quanta Magazine

Yitang Zhang on the beach adjoining the University of California, Santa Barbara, after scratching a function in the sand related to his current work on the Landau-Siegel zeros problem.

As an adolescent during the Cultural Revolution in China, Yitang Zhang wasn’t allowed to attend high school. Later, in his 30s, he worked odd jobs in the United States and sometimes slept in his car. But Zhang always believed he would solve a great math problem someday. Still, despite becoming one of China’s top math students and completing his doctorate at Purdue University in Indiana, for seven years Zhang could not find work as a mathematician. At one point, he worked at a friend’s Subway sandwich restaurant to pay the bills.

“I was not lucky,” Zhang, who is both incredibly reserved and self-confident, told Quanta in a 2015 interview.

At 44, after finally being hired to teach math at the University of New Hampshire, he turned his attention to number theory, a subject he had loved since childhood. He analyzed problems in his head during long walks near his home and the university. In his 50s, well past what many mathematicians consider their prime years (indeed, the Fields Medal is awarded to mathematicians under the age of 40), he began trying to prove the twin primes conjecture, which predicts an infinite number of prime number pairs that have a difference of two, such as 5 and 7, 29 and 31, and 191 and 193. No one had been able to prove this in over 150 years, and top number theorists could not even prove the existence of a bounded prime gap of any finite size.

In 2013, at 58, Zhang published his proof of a bounded prime gap below 70 million in one of the world’s most prestigious journals, the Annals of Mathematics. The paper’s referees wrote that Zhang, who had been unknown to established mathematicians, had proved “a landmark theorem in the distribution of prime numbers.”

Read more at: Quanta

The important thing is to keep thinking

This is a really inspirational story to me. “The important thing is to keep thinking.”

keep thinking

Source: http://www.reigndesign.com/blog/doing-it-with-twins-the-twin-prime-conjecture/

Now, I want you to imagine for a moment that you live in the United States, to be exact: New Hampshire. You’re a recruiter at the University of New Hampshireand your job is to hire the best people to become professors and lecturers.

Now suppose one day you get an application from this guy, Zhang Yitang, a 50-something mathematician. Since getting his PhD from Purdue, he’s struggled to find an academic job, working as a motel clerk and a Subway sandwich maker. I wouldn’t blame you if you passed over him.

It turns out if you had skipped Zhang Yitang, you’d have been making a big mistake, because a few weeks ago this 57-year old Chinese mathematician made headlines around the world when he proved a result in number theory which has been challenging mathematicians for years.

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