Twin prime conjecture

A twin prime is a prime number that differs from another prime number by two. Except for
the pair (2, 3), this is the smallest possible difference between two primes. Some examples of
twin prime pairs are (3, 5), (5, 7), (11, 13), (17, 19), (29, 31), (41, 43), ... (821, 823), etc.
Sometimes the term twin prime is used for a pair of twin primes; an alternative name for this
is prime twin.

The question of whether there exist infinitely many twin primes has been one of the great
open questions in number theory for many years. This is the content of the twin prime
conjecture, which states There are infinitely many primes p such that p + 2 is also prime. In
1849 de Polignac made the more general conjecture that for every natural number k, there are
infinitely many prime pairs p and p such that p p = 2k. The case k = 1 is the twin prime
conjecture.

A stronger form of the twin prime conjecture, the HardyLittlewood conjecture, postulates a
distribution law for twin primes akin to the prime number theorem.

In 1915, Viggo Brun showed that the sum of reciprocals of the twin primes was convergent.
This famous result, called Brun's theorem, was the first use of the Brun sieve and helped
initiate the development of modern sieve theory. The modern version of Brun's argument can
be used to show that the number of twin primes less than N does not exceed

for some absolute constant C > 0.

In 1940, Paul Erds showed that there is a constant c < 1 and infinitely many primes p such
that (p p) < (c ln p) where p denotes the next prime after p. This result was successively
improved; in 1986 Helmut Maier showed that a constant c < 0.25 can be used. In 2004 Daniel
Goldston and Cem Yldrm showed that the constant could be improved further to c =
0.085786 In 2005, Goldston, Jnos Pintz and Yldrm established that c can be chosen to
be arbitrarily small[1][2]

In fact, by assuming the ElliottHalberstam conjecture or a slightly weaker version, they

were able to show that there are infinitely many n such that at least two of n, n + 2, n + 6, n +
8, n + 12, n + 18, or n + 20 are prime. Under a stronger hypothesis they showed that at least
two of n, n + 2, n + 4, and n + 6 are prime.
Every twin prime pair except (3, 5) is of the form (6n 1, 6n + 1) for some natural number n,
and with the exception of n = 1, n must end in 0, 2, 3, 5, 7, or 8.

It has been proved that the pair (m, m+2) is a twin prime if and only if

If m 4 or m + 6 is also prime then the 3 primes are called a prime triplet.

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Twin_prime_conjecture.html

Veniola Forestryani
141810101035
MIPA/Matematika
 A Former Subway Worker Made a Breakthrough
Discovery in Math

A completely unknown guy in the world of math has made a breakthrough discovery
that will help us understand numbers better. Basically, a guy who once struggled to
find a job and had to work at Subway, is helping math geniuses understand the twin
prime conjecture, one of math's oldest problems.

Now, Yitang Zhang, the mysterious man behind the discovery, isn't some chump on
the side of the street. He earned a doctorate in 1992 from Purdue University and is
now a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire but before his report was
published, he was a complete unknown in mathematics. After he got his doctorate, he
spent many years as an accountant and worked at Subway because he couldn't get a
job in academia. Andrew Granville, a number theorist said:

Basically, no one knows him... Now, suddenly, he has proved one of the
great results in the history of number theory.

What Zhang did is especially impressive because many number theorists thought the
problem he's cracking was something no one was ever going to solve.

How did Zhang come out of nowhere? Simple. He just did his work and wrote it
down. Zhang submitted a paper to a top joaurnal, Annals of Mathematics, and when
the editors ran through his paper, they discovered its genius calling it "first rank" and
said that Zhang proved a landmark theorem in the distribution of prime numbers.
The Simons Foundation says Zhang's paper was written "with crystalline clarity and
a total command of the topics current state of the art, it was evidently a serious piece
of work." Some guy no one knew of three weeks ago just solved an unsolvable
problem.

For more detail on what Zhang helped make a breakthrough in (it involves proving
that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers with some finite gap, a sieve
and a hair's breadth), read the whole fascinating report at Simons Foundation.

http://gizmodo.com/a-former-subway-worker-made-a-breakthrough-discovery-in-
508987652