Posted on 11/17/2022 3:39:30 PM PST by nickcarraway
Yitang Zhang, a number theorist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has posted a paper on arXiv that hints at the possibility that he may have solved the Landau-Siegel zeros conjecture. The paper has not yet been validated by anyone else at this time, and Zhang himself has yet to explain the purpose or even meaning of his paper.
The paper posted by Zhang is not in a traditional format. There is no introduction or summation, or even any sort of explanation of its contents. Instead, it is a proof—a very long proof, 111 pages of math. Zahn does imply that his work is related to the Landau-Siegel zeros conjecture, however, and also implies in the title that it involves discrete estimates. The Landau-Siegel zeros conjecture is a sort of potential counterexample to the Riemann Hypothesis, which is theorized to predict the probability that numbers in a certain range are prime numbers.
Zhang is considered to be somewhat of an eccentric person. He was born and raised in China, and earned a master's degree at Peking University. He then moved to the United States where he earned a Ph.D. in math at Purdue University. But for unknown reasons, he was unable to get a job in his field, instead working a variety of menial labor jobs until finally landing a position at the University of New Hampshire. While there, Zhang toiled away on his own time for several years and then published what he'd been working on in 2013—the twin prime conjecture, which proposed that there are infinite pairs of prime numbers that differ by two.
The paper was considered a major breakthrough and made Zhang a celebrity of sorts in the math world. He has apparently been working on the Landau-Siegel zeros conjecture for many years. In 2007, he posted a paper about it as a preprint, but there were problems with the work, and it was never published in a peer-reviewed journal.
It will likely be some time before others finish reviewing Zhang's paper and offer commentary. And it is not clear if Zhang himself will comment publicly, although he is scheduled to present his paper to colleagues at Peking University sometime in the near future.
More information: Yitang Zhang, Discrete mean estimates and the Landau-Siegel zero, arXiv (2022). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2211.02515
Journal information: arXiv
I can’t believe this guy published first. Now all my work on this will have been for nothing.
This is so far beyond me...
On page 83, about halfway down, he misstated an exponent. Complete fail.
You still have time. :-D
He was the guy sitting behind you in class copying your paper. You can get him for plagiarism.
“may have proposed”
Shouldn’t the writer have determined that before writing the article? What a retard.
Whatever numbers with exponents.
Subtract the number 1
Suddenly it is indivisible, and there is justice for all
It’s all Greek to me...
Now I can get some rest. I was awake all night trying to figure it out.
… an infinite number of primes that differ by 2.
++++
Well they have to be odd so they can’t differ by 1. The same argument says they can’t differ by 3. Clearly that applies to 5, 7, 9, 11 … as well.
But there are a lot of primes. An infinite number I believe. So differing by 2 would seem to be relatively common at least as primes go. Seems likely there are an infinite number of them.
My more simple “proof”. 😎
OK, what does this mean IRL, the advancement of crypto keys or in decoding?
OK fine, but can he complete a Rubic’s cube in under 5 minutes?
Who knew that Martin and Bugsy even knew each other?
An odd duo, but they just loved Math...
It has no practical application.
There are some things people believe are true. One can just assume they’re true, so demonstrating that they are true has no effect.
Wasn’t this a episode on Netflix?
“It has no practical application”
Yet
The problem with 111 page proofs, is how do you prove the proof is correct?
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