Yitang Zhang is a largely unknown mathematician who has
struggled to find an academic job after he got his PhD, working
at a Subway sandwich shop before getting a gig as a lecturer at
the University of New Hampshire. He's just had a paper accepted
for publication in Annals of Mathematics, which appears to make
a breakthrough towards proving one of mathematics' oldest, most
difficult, and most significant conjectures, concerning "twin"
prime numbers. According to the Simons Science News article,
Zhang is shy, but is a very good, clear writer and lecturer. For
hundreds of years, mathematicians have speculated that there are
infinitely many twin prime pairs. In 1849, French mathematician
Alphonse de Polignac extended this conjecture to the idea that
there should be infinitely many prime pairs for any possible
finite gap, not just 2. Since that time, the intrinsic appeal of
these conjectures has given them the status of a mathematical
holy grail, even though they have no known applications. But
despite many effor