素数不再孤单孪生素数和一个执着的数学家张益唐.doc

素数不再孤单：孪生素数和一个执着的数学家张益唐 (2013-05-20 20:29:08) 转载▼ 标签： 孪生素数猜想 筛法 致谢：I would like to thank Prof. Shing-Tung Yau for suggesting the title of this article, Prof. William Dunham for information on the history of the Twin Prime Conjecture, Prof. Liming Ge for biographic information about Yitang Zhang, Prof. Shiu-Yuen Cheng for pointing out the paper of Soundararajan cited in this article, Prof. Lo Yang for information about Chengbiao Pan quoted below, and Prof. Yuan Wang for detailed information on results related to the twin prime conjecture, and Prof. John Coates for reading this article carefully and for several valuable suggestions. ?? What is mathematics? Kronecker said, “God made the integers, all the rest is the work of man.”What makes integers? Prime numbers! Indeed, every integer can be written, essentially uniquely, as a product of primes. Since ancient Egypt (around 3000BC), people have been fascinated with primes. ? More than two thousand years ago, Euclid proved that there are infinitely many primes, but people observed that primes occur less and less frequently. The celebrated Twin Prime Conjecture says the external exceptions can occur, i.e.,? there are infinitely many pairs of primes with gaps equal to 2. The first real breakthrough to this century old problem was made by the Chinese mathematician Yitang Zhang: There are infinitely many pairs of primes each of which is separated by at most 70 millions. ? Prime numbers ? The story of primes is long and complicated, and the story of Zhang is touching and inspiring. In some sense, the history of primes? gives an accurate snapshot of the history of? mathematics, and many major mathematicians have been attracted to them. ? After Euclid, the written history of prime numbers lay dormant until the 17th century when Fermat stated?that?all numbers of the form $2^{2^n} + 1$ (for natural numbers $n$)? are prime. He did not prove it but he checked it for $n =1, \cdots, 4$. Fermats work motivated Euler and many ot