Bounded gaps between primes
Brechas acotadas entre primos
- Date
- 2013 · confidence high
- Place
- Durham, New Hampshire, United States
- Credited to
- Yitang Zhang; improvements by James Maynard, Terence Tao and the Polymath 8 project
- People
- 👤 Terence Tao1975–👤 Zhang Yitang1955–
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
There are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by less than 70 million, the first result of this kind towards the twin prime conjecture; Maynard and Polymath reduced the bound to 246 within a year.
Zhang was an unknown lecturer without a permanent post; Helfgott proved the weak Goldbach conjecture that same year.
What it led to
- progress towards the twin primes
- collaborative online mathematics (Polymath)
- the Maynard sieve
Built on
- Goldston-Pintz-Yıldırım (2005)
- Bombieri-Vinogradov (theorem)
- Selberg sieve