Mathematician who solved prime-number riddle claims new breakthrough

"A mathematician who went from obscurity to luminary status in 2013 for cracking a century-old question about prime numbers now claims to have solved another. The problem is similar to—but distinct from—the Riemann hypothesis, which is considered one of the most important problems in mathematics.

Number theorist Yitang Zhang, who is based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, posted his proposed solution—a 111-page preprint—on the arXiv preprint server on 4 November¹. It has not yet been validated by his peers. But if it checks out, it will go some way towards taming the randomness of prime numbers, whole numbers that cannot be divided evenly by any number except themselves or 1."

Read more at Nature.