Counting from Infinity: Yitang Zhang and the Twin Prime Conjecture

Counting from Infinity: Yitang Zhang and the Twin Prime Conjecture

Documentary|

7/10

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.

Zhang Yitang

Erica Klarreich

Andrew Granville

Terence Tao

James Maynard

Kannan Soundararajan

Jacob Chi

Peter Sarnak

David Eisenbud

Lin Chang

Juliet Chi

Julius Chi

Enrico Bombieri

Edward Hinson

Wenhua Qian

Yaling Sun

Kenneth Ribet

Nicholas M. Katz

Daniel Alan Goldston