Wednesday, January 22, 2014
First Class!
- Discussion of course details:
- handout course
description
- Discussion of the many course features:
- In class activities.
- Homework
- Reading
- Portfolios
- Projects
- The Tool kit
- personal info sheet.
- Flatland as social commentary/satire.
- What is contemporary mathematics?
- Recent results on prime number problems.
- List of primes: 2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23, 29,31,...
- Some pairs are "twins" 3,5; 5,7; 11,13; 17,19; 29,31;...
- The twin prime conjecture: There are an infinite number of
"twin primes."
- This has not been proven though there is much evidence to
support the statement as being true.
- Recently there have been results that there are an infinite
number of pairs of primes that are within a large fixed number
of each other.
- FROM WIKIPEDIA:On April 17, 2013, Yitang Zhang announced a proof that
for some integer N that is at most 70 million, there
are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by N.[1][2]
Zhang's paper was accepted by Annals of Mathematics
in early May 2013.[3]
Terence Tao subsequently proposed a
Polymath
project collaborative effort to optimize Zhang’s bound;[4]
as of November 28, 2013, Thomas Engelsma claims to have
reduced the bound to N = 576.[5]
- Counting activity: How many pencils? Next class: How
many Leprechauns?