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 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 primes 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 managet to prove or disprove it.