Though the improvement is big. Mathematically speaking it amounts to a technicality. Still, the achievement showcases a new way of doing mathematics online. Since the proof appeared, mathematicians from across the world have been locked in an addictive race 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 prime are those just two number apart, like 3 and 5 , or 29 and 31. The conjecture, put forward in 1894, says there are an infinite number of these pairs, but no one has managed to prove or disprove it.