Suzanne's Mom's Blog

I love stories like this in any field, even a field as foreign to me as mathematics.

A mathematical puzzle that most experts didn’t expect to see solved in their lifetime has been quietly mastered by a professor in New Hampshire. He just got an idea and worked it out.

Carolyn Y. Johnson covers the story for the Boston Globe:

“A soft-spoken, virtually unknown mathematician from the University of New Hampshire has found himself overnight a minor celebrity, flooded with requests to give talks at top universities.

“On May 9, mathematician Yitang Zhang, who goes by Tom, received word that the editors of a prestigious journal, Annals of Mathematics, had accepted a paper in which he took an important step toward proving a very old problem in mathematics.”

He showed that there are “an infinite number of primes separated by less than 70 million. [It] excites mathematicians because it is the first time anyone has proved there are an infinite number of primes separated by an actual number. … News of the feat rippled across the math world.

“ ‘This is certainly one of the most spectacular results of the last decade,’ Alex Kontorovich, a mathematician at Yale University, wrote in an e-mail. ‘Many people expected not to see this result proved in their lifetime.’

“Zhang said that he began to think seriously about solving the problem four years ago. … The epiphany did not come to him until July 3 of last year, when he realized he could modify existing techniques, building on what others had tried.

“ ‘It is hard to answer “how,” ‘ Zhang wrote in an e-mail. ‘I can only say that it came to my mind very suddenly.’

“The mathematician lives a simple life that he says gives him the ability to concentrate on his work. … Zhang’s achievement shows what can be accomplished by the elegant instrument of the human mind, working alone.

“ ‘Keep thinking, think of it everyday,’ Zhang said he would tell himself. ..

“ ‘The old adage is that mathematics is a young person’s game, and moreover most of the top results come from people or groups of people known to produce them,’ Kontorovich wrote. “Professor Zhang has demonstrated not only that one can continue to be creative and inventive well into middle-age [he’s in his 50s], but that someone working hard enough, even (or especially) in isolation, can make astounding breakthroughs.’ ”

I love the reminder about the importance of time to think. Everyone needs time to think. Even people who are not solving math puzzles for the ages.