Counting from Infinity: Yitang Zhang and the Twin Prime Conjecture

Yitang Zhang (Chinese: 张益唐; pinyin: Zhāng Yìtáng; born February 5, 1955) is a Chinese-American mathematician primarily working in the field of number theory. He is a professor of mathematics at Sun Yat-sen University. In 2013, while working as a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, Zhang submitted an important paper on the Twin Prime Conjecture to the Annals of Mathematics, establishing the first finite bound on the least gap between consecutive primes that is attained infinitely often. Later that year, he was awarded the Ostrowski Prize, and then in 2014, the Cole Prize, Rolf Schock Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Zhang became a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in fall 2015. He retired from UCSB in 2025 and returned to China as a professor at Sun Yat-sen University.