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 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 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 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 1849, says there are an infinite number of these pairs, but no one has managed to prove or it.