Yitang Zhang; Prime Numbers; Twin Prime Conjecture; Number Theory; Bounded Gaps Between Primes; Mathematical Research; Persistence; Mathematics.
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A 58-year-old lecturer who had published no original work in 12 years, and who had spent years keeping the books at a friend’s Subway sandwich shop, mailed a paper to the Annals of Mathematics on April 17, 2013. Just over a month later it was accepted: pairs of consecutive primes less than 70 million apart occur infinitely often.
The article tells the story of Yitang Zhang, a Chinese-American mathematician who made an important breakthrough in number theory in 2013. At the time, Zhang was 58 years old and…