Yitang Zhang

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking
by Richard E. Nisbett
Published 17 Aug 2015

But brute computing power could never establish the truth of the conjecture, and a solution to the twin prime problem has long been a mathematical holy grail. On April 17, 2012, the Annals of Mathematics received a paper from an obscure mathematician at the University of New Hampshire that claimed a giant leap toward verifying the twin primes conjecture.12 The author was fiftysomething Yitang Zhang, who had spent many years adrift in jobs such as accountant and even Subway employee before he finally got a job at UNH. Mathematics journals are constantly fielding grandiose claims from obscure mathematicians, but the editors at the Annals found Zhang’s arguments plausible on the surface and promptly sent the paper out for review.