Yitang Zhang

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Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

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.