An old mathematical puzzle soon to be unraveled?
It is one the oldest mathematical problems in the world. Several centuries ago, the twin primes conjecture was formulated. As its name indicates, this hypothesis, which many science historians have attributed to the Greek mathematician Euclid, deals with prime numbers, those divisible only by themselves and by one (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc.). Under this assumption, there exists an infinite number of pairs of prime numbers whose difference is two, called twin primes (e.g., 3 and 5), but nobody has been able to confirm this so far.
In April 2013, the University of New Hampshire mathematician Yitang Zhang presented a “weak version” of this conjecture by showing that you will never stop finding pairs of primes separated by at most 70 million. (more…)