Breakthrough a step toward revealing hidden structure of prime numbers

"Save for Maynard, a 37-year-old virtuoso who specializes in analytic number theory, for which he won the 2022 Fields Medal—math’s most prestigious award. In dedicated Friday afternoon thinking sessions, he returned to the problem again and again over the past decade, to no avail. At an American Mathematical Society meeting in 2020, he enlisted the help of Guth, who specializes in a technique known as harmonic analysis, which draws from ideas in physics for separating sounds into their constituent notes. Guth also sat with the problem for a few years. Just before giving up, he and Maynard hit a break. Borrowing tactics from their respective mathematical dialects and exchanging ideas late into the night over an email chain, they pulled some unorthodox moves to finally break Ingham’s bound."

This quote doesn't suggest that the only thing unorthodox about their approach was using some ideas from harmonic analysis. There's nothing remotely new about using harmonic analysis in number theory.

1. I would say the key idea in a first course in analytic number theory (and the key idea in Riemann's famous 1859 paper) is "harmonic analysis" (and this is no coincidence because Riemann was a pioneer in this area). See: https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/16bh3mi/what_is_the_b....

2. The hottest "big thing" in number theory right now is essentially "high dimensional" harmonic analysis on number fields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automorphic_form, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langlands_program. The 1-D case that the Langlands program is trying to generalize is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate%27s_thesis, also called "Fourier analysis on number fields," one of the most important ideas in number theory in the 20th century.

3. One of the citations in the Guth Maynard paper is the following 1994 book: H. Montgomery, Ten Lectures On The Interface Between Analytic Number Theory And Harmonic Analysis, No. 84. American Mathematical Soc., 1994. There was already enough interface in 1994 for ten lectures, and judging by the number of citations of that book (I've cited it myself in over half of my papers), much more interface than just that!

What's surprising isn't that they used harmonic analysis at all, but where in particular they applied harmonic analysis and how (which are genuinely impossible to communicate to a popular audience, so I don't fault the author at all).

To me your comment sounds a bit like saying "why is it surprising to make a connection." Well, breakthroughs are often the result of novel connections, and breakthroughs do happen every now and then, but that doesn't make the novel connections not surprising!

The somewhat cynical but honest answer is that all articles need some kind of pretty image at the top because when you share a link on any social media platform, the platform looks for an image to use as a thumbnail. If it doesn't find one, it gets posted as just a plain link and almost no one clicks it.

This is why Medium requires an image on every post, why every programming blog out there puts random pictures of laptops and coffee cups at the top of their articles, why Unsplash is so popular, and now why AI-generated images at the top of posts are so common.

It's dumb.

Reminds me of a story where some egghead friend of mine had a friend that was a researcher at a state school in California.

In his research, he found something like getting unenriched uranium to react (please excuse my complete lack of familiarity with the subject).

Apparently some government agency stepped in, classified his research and asked him to start.

Makes me where else this might have happened - there must be some interesting stuff out there.

> “At first sight, they look pretty random,” says James Maynard, a mathematician at the University of Oxford. “But actually, there’s believed to be this hidden structure within the prime numbers.”

What would the pattern of primes hypothetically look like? Is there expected to be some kind of closed form formula? If the Riemann hypothesis were proven, what would be the next step to understanding the distribution? Or is the proof itself expected to hold this answer?

No, IF is unquestionably in NP. The definition of NP is that a purported solution can be checked in polynomial time. That's it. Factorization can be verified by multiplication, in polynomial time, therefore the problem is in NP. Perhaps you're confounding NP with NPC? Recall that P is a subset of NP.

Not sure what you mean by "IF's decision problem" though. Primality is in P.