Zhang Yitang walked on the California beach and wrote the Landau-Siegel zero-point conjecture
David Yu | Writing
The news that Zhang Yitang had conquered the Landau-Siegel Zeros Conjecture caused a sensation in the mathematical community.
Weibo blogger "Physical Cheese Mathematical Sauce" believes that if Zhang Yitang proves the existence of the Landau-Siegel zero point, then Zhang Yitang is directly the greatest mathematician in the 50 years before and after, not one of them.
If Zhang Yitang could make Landau-Siegel, it would be equivalent to a person being struck by lightning twice.
And the last time he was struck by lightning was in 2013.
That year, he published " bounded intervals between prime numbers " in Annals of Mathematics, the highest journal in mathematics. This paper proved for the first time that pairs of prime numbers with finite distances are infinitely many, making a qualitative breakthrough in the number theory puzzle of the twin prime number conjecture.
Before the paper was published, he had to make a living from everywhere, but for a long time he did not find a good job, sometimes even borrowing the basement of a friend's house. Even if the teachers of Peking University invited him to return to China, he declined.
Zhang Yitang was born in Beijing in 1955. His parents were intellectuals, and his father was placed on probation for more than 20 years because of his early membership in the Shanghai underground party.
He was entrusted to his grandmother in Shanghai to raise him since he was a child, and no one taught him when he was a child, but when he was three or four years old, he knew a lot of words, could read "Lin Hai Xue Yuan", and at the age of four or five, he could speak the capitals of most countries in the world.
In the third grade of elementary school, he found that he could prove the Pythagorean theorem. Among his favorite "100,000 Whys", two articles made a deep impression on him. One is the Goldbach conjecture and the other is Fermat's Last Theorem.
In 1968, at the age of 12, Zhang Yitang returned to Beijing to study advanced mathematics, but could no longer find books, and his parents had been sent to Jiangxi.
Due to his father's history, he did not have the opportunity to go to high school, so he could only go to Beijing to work as a worker in a lock factory, until the college entrance examination resumed in 1978, he was admitted to Peking University, and then studied under the famous mathematician Professor Pan Chengbiao for a master's degree. As the perennial first place in the mathematics department, his score is often far more than the second place.
Mathematicians Pan Chengdong and Pan Chengbiao
In 1985, Zhang Yitang went to Purdue University in the United States to pursue a doctorate, under the supervision of Taiwanese scholar Mo Zongjian.
Zhang Yitang wrote his doctoral dissertation in two years, which proved the Jacobi conjecture, and in order to emulate his teacher, he quoted a lot of theories that his supervisor had proven in his dissertation.
The paper caused a sensation in the mathematical community, and mathematical theorists around the world were looking at Zhang Yitang's paper. Under the careful examination of mathematicians all over the world, it was found that Mo Zongjian's achievement was wrong. Therefore, Zhang Yitang's proof is also wrong. Therefore, Zhang Yitang's papers have all lost their meaning.
Mo Zongjian
Professors at Purdue University still found the doctoral dissertation valuable, did a lot of work, and still awarded Zhang Yitang a doctorate. But mentor Mo Zongjian was furious! Zhang Yitang's thesis made him extremely humiliated, so he refused to write a recommendation letter to Zhang Yitang to find a job, and used his contacts to prevent his paper from being published.
After graduating with a doctorate in 1991, Zhang Yitang and his supervisor Mo Zongjian broke up, and the absence of a letter of recommendation from a supervisor among graduates in the United States is like not obtaining a graduation certificate in China, which means that the student has not been recognized by the supervisor, which not only means that the ability is insufficient, but also the credibility is not good.
There is no recommendation letter from a supervisor and no published papers, so there is no way to enter academia in the United States. He ran into walls everywhere, and he couldn't find a job in the bank to make a living, let alone a teaching position, or even a postdoctoral position.
To make matters worse, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a large number of Russian mathematical geniuses have gone to the United States, occupying a large number of mathematics professorships in American universities, making it difficult for the fledgling Zhang Yitang to find a job.
He has wandered a lot, worked in a Chinese restaurant, worked in a motel, once had nowhere to sleep in a car, and ate at a classmate studying in the United States at Peking University, and later he found a restaurant waiter position in the subway, responsible for washing dishes and delivering takeaway.
During this time, he not only achieved nothing in his career, but also an older bachelor, did not have a girlfriend, did not have the money to fall in love, and even had difficulty supporting himself.
During this period, the teacher of Peking University heard about Zhang Yitang's experience and invited him to return to China to teach, but he declined, and he felt that there was no point in returning.
Later, at the invitation of an alumnus of Peking University's Department of Chemistry, Zhang Yitang came to work as an accountant at his Subway franchise store in Kentucky, and also helped with cashier when the store was busy. Later, the alumnus recommended him to Tang Puqi, who worked for a computer company in the same class.
In 1999, Zhang Yitang cooperated with Tang Puqi to publish an Internet patent. The patent involved a widely practical computer algorithm problem, but Zhang Yitang only took 3 weeks to solve it, which impressed Tang Puqi.
Zhang Yitang discusses math problems with students at the University of New Hampshire
Therefore, Tang Puqi introduced Zhang Yitang to his student Ge Liming, who taught at the University of New Hampshire, and then upon the recommendation of Ge Liming, Zhang Yitang successively served as a teaching assistant and lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Statistics here, teaching calculus, algebra, elementary number theory and other courses. 4 courses per semester, paid on a daily basis, no research funding.
But none of this is important to him, at least there is an office there, and paper and pens are enough.
At the University of New Hampshire, he has taught many classes, and Zhang Yitang scored very high on the most famous online reviewers in the United States, and the most mentioned points in the reviews by students were that he was "funny" (funny), his accent, and his class was "easy".
In 2003, 48-year-old Zhang Yitang finally got married. He married Sun Yaling, a waiter he met while working at a restaurant, in San Jose, California.
At a symposium at the National Institute of Mathematical Sciences in San Francisco in 2008, the world's top number theorists discussed how to solve an important problem of "the last step away" - whether there is a maximum interval between twin primes. This is a world-class mathematical problem with the Riemann conjecture and the Goldbach conjecture.
A week later, the meeting failed. The mathematician Goldston even desperately believes that he will never get an answer in his lifetime.
Two years later, Zhang Yitang learned about this matter, and his intuition told him that he should be able to do it. He suspended his other research and devoted more than two years to "the last step" study.
Zhang Yitang used a set of ingenious methods to prove that there are countless pairs of prime numbers (p,q), where the difference between the two prime numbers in each pair, that is, the distance between p and q, does not exceed 70 million.
In May 2013, Annals of Mathematics, the world's top mathematical journal, approved his paper "Bounded Distances Between Prime Numbers". The paper broke the journal's fastest acceptance rate since its inception and was approved in just 3 weeks.
Later, Zhang Yitang visited Princeton and met the reviewer at the time, Evanles, who commented that the certificate was "crystal transparent." Edward Smith, Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, Frenkel once commented that Zhang Yitang's proof has the "beauty of the Renaissance", although deep and complex, but the thinking is clear and clear.
We all know that the smallest distance between prime numbers is 2, and later many mathematicians gradually narrowed this distance from 70 million, and now it is said to have narrowed to 6, using the method pioneered by Zhang Yitang, using the American mathematician Daniel Smith. Goldstone's words, "The distance from 70 million to 2 is insignificant compared to the distance from infinity to 70 million."
Prizes followed
2014 Rove Schock Award
2014 Kohl Prize in Number Theory
2014 MacArthur Genius Award
2016 Qiushi Outstanding Scientist Award
Many people believe that his proof may exceed Chen Jingrun's "1+2" proof of Goldbach's conjecture.
Three years after the twin prime conjecture came to fruition, Zhang became a tenured professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, moving from cold New Hampshire in the northeastern United States to warm California, starting a new life at the age of 60.
He has no pressure on research because he doesn't need to keep publishing papers to get more project funding. For Zhang Yitang, doing math only requires paper and pen, sometimes even neither, "just think about it."
In his academic career of more than 40 years, Zhang Yitang has actually published only 3 papers. In addition to the twin prime conjecture in 2013, two other papers published in the Duke Journal of Mathematics in 2001 and Acta Mathematicia in 1985 are related to the Riemann hypothesis.
In fact, the Landau-Siegel zero-point conjecture is the "big problem" that he has been determined to work on since his youth. As " a special and possibly much weaker form of the generalized Riemann conjecture " , the proof of the Landau –Siegel zero-point conjecture is of great significance in advancing the Riemann conjecture , as important as his previous twin prime conjecture.
He once said in an interview: "I have this ambition. The Riemann conjecture is recognized in mathematics , and neither the Goldbach conjecture nor twin primes can compare with it, and it is the most important and famous problem."
In the words of his colleague Stopple, a mathematical theorist, if Zhang can prove this, then with his last achievement, "in a sense, it is like the same person being struck by lightning twice." "If he never became famous, doing this work would have put him in the world's attention like the last time," he said.
After becoming famous, the New Yorker reporter once asked him, what talent does a mathematician need? "Focus."
When asked why he would rather serve dishes in the United States than return to China to develop, his answer was intriguing: "The worldly pressure in China is too great, you can't avoid it, if you don't produce a paper, what will happen to you." Although I can calm down myself, I don't want these things, but your family, relatives and friends do not agree. There is no such problem in the United States. “
"What I admire about America is that you work in a fast-food restaurant, collect money at a supermarket, and no one looks down on you. In the United States, I am still me, but when I go back to China, I am not me. ”