Closing the gap
Subtitle: the quest to understand prime numbers
By: Vicky Neale
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 164
ISBN-13: 9780198788287
Subjects: Prime Numbers
Description: In 2013, a little-known mathematician in his late 50s stunned the mathematical community with a breakthrough on an age-old problem about prime numbers. Since then, there has been further dramatic progress on the problem, thanks to the efforts of a large-scale online collaborative effort of a type that would have been unthinkable in mathematics a couple of decades ago. Prime numbers have intrigued, inspired and infuriated mathematicians for millennia. Every school student studies prime numbers and can appreciate their beauty, and yet mathematicians' difficulty in answering some seemingly simple questions about them reveals the depth and subtlety of prime numbers. In this book, Vicky Neale charts the recent progress towards proving the famous Twin Primes Conjecture, and the very different ways in which the breakthroughs have been made: a solo mathematician working in isolation and obscurity, and a large collaboration that is more public than any previous collaborative effort in mathematics and that reveals much about how mathematicians go about their work. Interleaved with this story are highlights from a significantly older tale, going back two thousand years and more, of mathematicians' efforts to comprehend the beauty and unlock the mysteries of the prime numbers. -- from dust jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: What is a prime?; title: May 2013; title: It's easy to ask hard questions; title: May 2013; title: Making hard problems easier; title: June 2013; title: How many primes are there?; title: July 2013; title: What's so mathematical about my mathematical pencil?; title: August 2013; title: If primes are hard, let's try something else; title: November 2013; title: Generalize...; title: April 2014; title: Where next?