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Has a Chinese-born professor discovered a big piece to a 150-year-old maths puzzle?
- Zhang Yitang, who has a reputation for solving perplexing problems in number theory, is set to reveal his latest work soon
- Experts think the new paper could have crucial implications for mathematics
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Ling Xinin Beijing
The usually solitary, hermetic world of mathematics has begun to buzz – thanks to an unassuming Chinese-born mathematician with a reputation for solving the unsolvable.
Sixty-seven-year-old Yitang Zhang may have taken a key step towards understanding the most important unsolved problem in mathematics, a problem that has vexed academics for more than a century.
More than 20 years ago, Zhang, now a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, began to tackle a conjecture related to the Riemann hypothesis, a formula for the distribution of prime numbers.
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On Saturday, a 111-page manuscript that seems to have been written by Zhang, began to circulate in the research community. The article showed a proof related to the Riemann hypothesis.
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The paper, “Discrete mean estimates and the Landau-Siegel zero”, has neither been peer reviewed nor confirmed by Zhang himself, but if verified, it could be a historic breakthrough for number theory and mathematics in general, according to experts.
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