

Yitang Zhang’s Discovery – An Attack on the Twin-prime Conjecture [video] - jonbaer
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/video-yitang-zhang-discovery

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colbyh
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkMXdShDdtY)

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aaronbrethorst
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime#History)

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

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pyrois
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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jdawg77
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.

