sixty-five million sound like a big deal by any standard. That's the size of the improvement that an online army of collaborating mathematicians has already made to groundbreaking roof involving pairs f prime numbers,which was first announce just a few weeks ago.
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 to tighten it up.
The work relates to a long standing 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 1849,says there and an infinite number of these pairs,but on one has managed to prove or disprove it.