[This is a back-issue of one of this site’s newsletters]
Missed Monday Morning Math? This week’s issue has some big news about prime numbers.
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There’s big, big news in the world of math today – a new discovery about prime numbers!
We learn about prime numbers in school. Maybe we also learn about twin primes – prime numbers that are two apart, like 11 and 13, or 71 and 73.
For a long time, mathematicians have suspected that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that are 2 apart – but nobody’s been able to prove it.
In fact, nobody has been able to prove that the smallest gaps between prime numbers doesn’t just get bigger and bigger and bigger as you go up and up.
Nobody, that is, until now!
A (previously!) virtually unknown researcher, Yitang Zhang, has made a big breakthrough. He’s proved that there’s an infinite number of pairs of primes X apart, where X is some number less than seventy million.
This means that no matter how far you go, there will always be prime numbers “close together”… at least, not more than 70 million apart!
We can expect more news of this sort to roll off the press in the years ahead…
While you’re waiting, on Spoonful.com I’ve been writing about amazing facts about cubes, printable clock worksheets, and some kitchen math – how to use fractions to make a 3 pint bottle of sherbet. Also, a non-math-related post on steamboat cooking.