Recently, a Chinese-American mathematician named Yitang Zhang claimed to have resolved the Landau-Siegel zeroes conjecture, which is related to the Riemann hypothesis. (Specifically, disproving the conjecture brings us a small stop closer to proving the Riemann hypothesis.) His paper hasn’t been validated verified by independent mathematicians yet, but it
A fascinating observation by Cixin Liu in an interview in Public Books, to John Plotz and translated by Pu Wang (numbers added): … technology precedes science. (1) Way before the rise of modern science, there were so many technologies, so many technological innovations. But today technology is deeply embedded in the
Bernhard Riemann
On June 8, Nautilus published a piece by Evelyn Lamb talking about mathematical near-misses. Imagine a mathematician trying to solve a problem using a specific technique and imagine it allows her to get really, really close to a solution – but not the solution itself. That’s a mathematical near-miss, and
