Sixty-five million sound like a big deal by any standard. That's the size of the improvement that an online army of collaborating mathematician has already made to a groundbreaking proof involving pairs of prime numbers,which was first announced just a few weeks ago.
Though the improvement is big,mathematically speaking it amounts to a technicality.Still,the achievement showcase a new way of doing mathematics online.Since the proof appeared,mathematicians from across the world have been locked in an addictive race to tighten it up.
The work relates to a longstanding problem called the twin prime conjecture. a prime number can only be divided by 1 and itself,and twin primes are those just two numbers apart,like 3 and 5 , or 29 and 31 . The conjecture , put forward in 1894, says there are infinite number of these pairs,but no one has managed to prove or disprove it.