Sean Sather-Wagstaff, NDSU

Math Club, November 21^st .

Title:  The Twin Prime Conjecture

Abstract. The Twin Prime Conjecture is one of the most famous open questions in all of mathematics, and one of the easiest to state. It asks whether there are infinitely many prime numbers p such that p+2 is also prime. I will discuss the history of this question and recent progress that stunned the mathematical world and transformed a relatively unknown mathematician into an international star almost overnight. One fascinating aspect of this is the use of crowdsourcing (led by the Fields Medalist Terence Tao, recently interviewed on the Colbert Report) to improve the initial results.