> To give a sense of the scale of this claim: If correct, Zhang's work is the most significant progress towards the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis in a century.
Thanks, that totally failed to give any sense of scale.
Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
31–40 of 439 posts
Re: Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
#32> To give a sense of the scale of this claim: If correct, Zhang's work is the most significant progress towards the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis in a century. Thanks, that totally failed to give any sense of scale.
It's the moral equivalent of making major headway against P!=NP; or, proving that there are no global hidden variables in QM; or, that there's a clear path ("just engineering") to room-temperature semiconductors.
Re: Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
#33Is there a real world outcome to this result?
There are many, many, many consequences for prime numbers--which to me are concrete enough to be interesting (and are way more concrete than what 99% of mathematicians work on!).
On the other hand, I doubt this proof will help you to build a faster gizmo or something in the real world.. especially since it's proving something we really think is true (a consequence of the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis), and for real-world applications you can just assume the thing that we think is true is actually true (even if we haven't been able to prove it for a century). (E.g., you don't need to prove that factoring is hard to use cryptography for practical purposes..)
Re: Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
#34I can't resist saying one last thing about Siegel zeros: number theorists REALLY would like for this result to be correct because the possibility of Siegel zeros is unbelievably annoying. I mean mathematicians are supposed to enjoy challenges / difficulties, but Siegel zeros are just so recurrently irritating. The possibility of Siegel zeros means that in so many theorems you want to write down, you have to write cav…
>I can't resist saying one last thing
Please, keep going. This is good reading.
Re: Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, if you want to see something incredible (in both the literal sense and the usual sense), read https://www.math.purdue.edu/~ttm/ZhangYt.pdf (by Moh).
Yeah I started reading that from the Wiki citation. Yikes. Academia is brutal.
Man, it's so weird and pathetic
All of these guys are probably a hundred times smarter than me or most of the other code monkeys working for the FANGMAN, but they're all squabbling over little 5-figure scraps of grant money.
Re: Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
#36I'm not a mathematician, but the story of Yitang Zhang desperately makes me want this paper to be correct. > Prior to getting back to academia, he worked for several years as an accountant and a delivery worker for a New York City restaurant. He also worked in a motel in Kentucky and in a Subway sandwich shop. A profile published in the Quanta Magazine reports that Zhang used to live in his car during the initial job…
Someone needs to make a movie about his life, or at least a documentary.
There is a documentary, but I can't attest to its quality (I haven't watched it yet): http://www.zalafilms.com/films/countingabout.html.
Re: Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
#37I am pretty confident that I will never in my lifetime fully understand stuff like this (not the symbols themselves, but the overall meaning of each term and why it is like that): https://i.snipboard.io/by4tsH.jpg
Maybe because you haven't tried to understand it? Can't be harder than learning the meaning behind these characters: https://www.pandatree.com/book/DiaryofWorm.jpg
It would take a long path to understand it.. and the path would need to be filled with good resources.
Re: Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
#38Should I be suspicious that the exponent in the equation is the current year? LOL
I still need to read the article. The letter from Moh was interesting.
Re: Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
#39Is there a real world outcome to this result?
I think it's fair to say that this could lead to certain new things becoming known about the distribution of primes. This could have implications for cryptographic algorithms that depend on prime numbers being hard to find.
Re: Monumental (if correct) advance in number theory posted to ArXiv by Yitang Zhang
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Zhang's previous result was good enough to rebuff Hardy's claims. Actually I think Math is more or less a young people's game is because whence someone be super successful and famous it's kinda difficult psychological to retain the previous mental state and push out similar results.
Plenty of counterexamples to the claim https://mathoverflow.net/questions/25630/major-mathematical-...
More counterexamples here too: https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/xw8i9w/oldest_person_....