Zhang Yitang

Zhang Yitang (February 5, 1955 -), a native of Shanghai, originally from Pinghu, Zhejiang, is a Chinese-American mathematician whose research field is analytic number theory. On April 17, 2013, he published an article in "Annals of Mathematics" related to the twin prime conjecture "Bounded Intervals between Prime Numbers", which proved for the first time that there are infinite pairs of prime numbers with finite gaps (the specific gap is less than 70 million, see Prime Number Difference). In 2016, he was invited by President Yang Zuyou to join the University of California, Santa Barbara as a tenured professor in the Department of Mathematics. In June 2025, he moved his family back to China, joined Sun Yat-sen University full-time, and was employed by the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study of Sun Yat-sen University. Zhang Yitang dropped out of school due to political reasons since childhood. In 1978, he was admitted to the Department of Mathematics of Peking University to receive undergraduate and postgraduate education. In the 1980s, he went to the United States to complete his doctoral thesis at Purdue University. During this period, he was assigned to study algebraic geometry with Mo Zongjian, which he was not interested in. After graduating with a Ph.D., I did not receive a recommendation letter from my supervisor, and I relied on doing odd jobs to make a living for a long time. I once worked as a cashier in a fast food restaurant, a Chinese food delivery person, and odd jobs in motels. Later, with the help of alumni, he obtained a lecturer position at the University of New Hampshire. He has not given up his research in the field of number theory. The Annals of Mathematics usually reviews manuscripts for two years, and his paper passed peer review within five weeks, setting a record for the fastest acceptance time in the 130 years since its founding. The proof that the gap between prime numbers is bounded has attracted the attention of scholars in the field of prime number research.