{"id":659,"date":"2013-05-21T10:51:40","date_gmt":"2013-05-21T02:51:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/?p=659"},"modified":"2024-02-16T21:12:49","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T13:12:49","slug":"big-prime-number-news-monday-morning-math","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/2013\/05\/big-prime-number-news-monday-morning-math\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Prime Number News – Monday Morning Math"},"content":{"rendered":"
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[This is a back-issue of one of this site’s newsletters<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

There’s big, big news in the world of math today – a new discovery about prime numbers!<\/p>\n

We learn about prime numbers in school. Maybe we also learn about twin primes<\/strong> – prime numbers that are two apart, like 11 and 13, or 71 and 73.<\/p>\n

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For a long time, mathematicians have suspected that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that are 2 apart – but nobody’s been able to prove it.<\/p>\n

In fact, nobody has been able to prove that the smallest gaps between prime numbers doesn’t just get bigger and bigger and bigger as you go up and up.<\/p>\n

Nobody, that is, until now!<\/p>\n

A (previously!) virtually unknown researcher, Yitang Zhang, has made a big breakthrough<\/a>. He’s proved that there’s an infinite number of pairs of primes X apart, where X is some number less than seventy million.<\/p>\n

This means that no matter how far you go, there will always be prime numbers “close together”… at least, not more than 70 million apart!<\/p>\n

We can expect more news of this sort to roll off the press in the years ahead…<\/p>\n

While you’re waiting, on Spoonful.com<\/a> I’ve been writing about amazing facts about cubes<\/a>, printable clock worksheets<\/a>, and some kitchen math – how to use fractions to make a 3 pint bottle of sherbet<\/a>. Also, a non-math-related post on steamboat cooking<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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[This is a back-issue of one of this site’s newsletters] There’s big, big news in the world of math today – a new discovery about prime numbers! We learn about prime numbers in school. Maybe we also learn about twin primes – prime numbers that are two apart, like 11 and 13, or 71 and … Continue reading Big Prime Number News – Monday Morning Math<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[153],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1310,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659\/revisions\/1310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}