Monday July 15, Maryland Public Television presented the
film “Counting from Infinity: Yitang Zhang and the Twin Prime Conjecture” (2015) from
Zalafilms, directed by George Paul Csicsery.
The controversy started with a lecture and paper from the
University of New Hampshire in 2013 by the protagonist.
This refers to the existence of a minimum number for which
there are infinite prime numbers less than that difference between them. The
mathematical proofs (on computers) keep shrinking that minimum to a few hundred
now. The concept is
counterintuitive; you would expect this
number to diverge but it does not.
This led to the involvement of the Polymath group at
Berkeley, and some papers by young Oxford professor James Maynard from England.
I took number theory in my first semester of graduate school
at the University of Kansas in 1966. I
can recall the (India-born) professor saying “Is it not?” all the time, not
quite used to idiomatic English. I can remember hour examinations in grad
school; you can’t solve four problems you haven’t seen before in that amount of
time. Final exams were much easier than
hour tests. (Some of the videos on
Harvard student John Fish’s channel get into problem solving on exams.)
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