Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Sieves of Brun and Selberg
- 3 Early Work
- 4 The Breakthrough of Goldston, Motohashi, Pintz and Yildirim
- 5 The Astounding Result of Yitang Zhang
- 6 Maynard’s Radical Simplification
- 7 Polymath’s Refinements of Maynards Results
- 8 Variations on Bombieri–Vinogradov
- 9 Further Work and the Epilogue
- Appendix A Bessel Functions of the First Kind
- Appendix B A Type of Compact Symmetric Operator
- Appendix C Solving an Optimization Problem
- Appendix D A Brun–Titchmarsh Inequality
- Appendix E The Weil Exponential Sum Bound
- Appendix F Complex Function Theory
- Appendix G The Dispersion Method of Linnik
- Appendix H One Thousand Admissible Tuples
- Appendix I PGpack Minimanual
- References
- Index
3 - Early Work
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Sieves of Brun and Selberg
- 3 Early Work
- 4 The Breakthrough of Goldston, Motohashi, Pintz and Yildirim
- 5 The Astounding Result of Yitang Zhang
- 6 Maynard’s Radical Simplification
- 7 Polymath’s Refinements of Maynards Results
- 8 Variations on Bombieri–Vinogradov
- 9 Further Work and the Epilogue
- Appendix A Bessel Functions of the First Kind
- Appendix B A Type of Compact Symmetric Operator
- Appendix C Solving an Optimization Problem
- Appendix D A Brun–Titchmarsh Inequality
- Appendix E The Weil Exponential Sum Bound
- Appendix F Complex Function Theory
- Appendix G The Dispersion Method of Linnik
- Appendix H One Thousand Admissible Tuples
- Appendix I PGpack Minimanual
- References
- Index
Summary
This chapter gives a sample of work done on prime gaps spanning more than half of the twentieth century, showing the importance of the problem and giving a context for what was to follow. Erdős proved in 1940 that there are an infinite number of consecutive primes strictly less than the average gap. His proof is given in Section 3.3. Section 3.4 gives the theorem of Bombieri and Davenport showing that there are an infinite number of primes less than half the average gap. Their proof uses many advanced methods and tools with a fundamental lemma of 10 steps. Section 3.5 gives Granville and Soundararajan’s version of the work of Maier, which has applications to primes in intervals as well as prime gaps.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Bounded Gaps Between PrimesThe Epic Breakthroughs of the Early Twenty-First Century, pp. 89 - 113Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021