Yitang Zhang Awarded MacArthur Fellowship

[John]

Here is the relevant page: http://www.macfound.org/fellows/927/

Of course, congratulations are in order for all of the 2014 Fellows, but Dr. Zhang's story in particular is pretty awesome.

Edit: Just to elaborate without forcing a read-through of the first link, Zhang had a difficult time of things after earning his Ph.D. After years of working in various non-academic jobs (e.g. as an accountant, delivery man, and Subway sandwich artist), he landed a position at the University of New Hampshire in 1999. In 2013 he achieved fame in the mathematics community for proving that there exist infinitely many pairs of prime numbers differing by at most 70,000,000. This was the first finite bound established for prime gaps, a major result in number theory and possibly a step towards proving the twin prime conjecture.

In related (but older) news, thanks to the Polymath 8 project proposed by Terence Tao, the original bound of 70,000,000 has been reduced to just 246; and assuming the Elliot-Halberstam conjecture holds, the bound is as low as 6.

Edited September 20, 2014 by John

[ajb]

Jacob Lurie has also been awarded such a fellowship. His work is on derived algebraic geometry, higher category theory and higher topos theory. Not that these things are directly related to my published work, but they give a very higher categorical framework for quantum field theory. The criticism here is that it is often very hard to make connections between this higher categorical set-up and QFT/string theory as physicists know it. I know this from some recent exploits of mine in this direction. It would be nice to have a bridge between the two camps...

 

http://www.macfound.org/fellows/921/

Edited September 20, 2014 by ajb