Yitang Zhang’s Discovery – An Attack on the Twin-prime Conjecture [video]

Posted by jonbaer on Thursday January 29, 2015 @08:36AM
from the newyorker.com dept.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/video-yitang-zhang-discovery

( 6 comments | 42 points | on HN )

Re:Yitang Zhang’s Discovery – An Attack on the Twin-prime Co... by colbyh on Thursday January 29, 2015 @03:25PM (#8968626)

That video was rather bad. If you want a better description of the Twin Prime Conjecture I think these guys do a much better job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkMXdShDdtY

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Re:Yitang Zhang’s Discovery – An Attack on the Twin-prime Co... by aaronbrethorst on Thursday January 29, 2015 @03:30PM (#8968644)

Or, if you'd rather read a 1 sentence description instead:

    [The twin prime conjecture] states: There are
    infinitely many primes p such that p + 2 is
    also prime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime#History

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Re:Yitang Zhang’s Discovery – An Attack on the Twin-prime Co... by mzs on Thursday January 29, 2015 @04:16PM (#8968882)

Hmm… I preferred the New Yorker video. It was shorter, it very quickly explained the twin prime conjecture, then it explained what was proven recently, then gave some insight into how, and finally said the bound had been decreased since then.

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Re:Yitang Zhang’s Discovery – An Attack on the Twin-prime Co... by eximius on Thursday January 29, 2015 @03:03PM (#8968505)

Well, no... he didn't solve it. He just got us closer.

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Re:Yitang Zhang’s Discovery – An Attack on the Twin-prime Co... by pyrois on Thursday January 29, 2015 @03:13PM (#8968562)

He was the first to prove that a finite bound exists. This is a huge, huge deal, since taking the answer from immensely large but finite to 2 is much easier than establishing a finite bound in the first place (as evidenced by the rapid decline in the bound from 70 million to somewhere around 250 in the last year). So, I wouldn't call it "just" getting us closer. It'll probably be proved some time in the next decade or so, and the conjecture was first made in the mid 1800s.

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Re:Yitang Zhang’s Discovery – An Attack on the Twin-prime Co... by jdawg77 on Friday January 30, 2015 @12:37AM (#8970600)

Renyi entropy, and why this discovery is huge, are the whole cipher / counter cipher structure of modern "Crypto." If we (for a moment) hypothesis that math, itself, is an artiface of culture...then, we see that Lofti Zadeh (thank him for the 'net) and Bart Kosko's math model of the hypercube are still the best proofs.

Eg, to a large degree, Yitang Zhang validated both gentleman's work immensely, as Bart, in particular, first proved that the whole 100% of "Probability," is in fact a subset of continuum theory, aka, Fuzzy Logic. It's the "Probability and the hypercube," model, put forth in Kosk's 90's book. Fascinating reading.

Of course, it could be that, the model is too simple, to elegant to "fly," as we Americans like complex stuff that is far, far out of reach of lay people. It's an academic bias that I, with no degree holding family, simply do not share or partake in. Truly breakthrough discovery can, and does, happen in a lot of places.

One simply needs to know where to look.

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