Yitang Zhang is a Chinese-American mathematician primarily working on number theory and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 2015.
20 Facts About Yitang Zhang
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Previously working at the University of New Hampshire as a lecturer, Zhang submitted a paper to the Annals of Mathematics in 2013 which established the first finite bound on the least gap between consecutive primes that is attained infinitely often.
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Yitang Zhang became a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in fall 2015.
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Yitang Zhang was born in Shanghai, China, with his ancestral home in Pinghu, Zhejiang.
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Yitang Zhang lived in Shanghai with his grandmother until he went to Peking University.
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Yitang Zhang first learned about Fermat's Last Theorem and the Goldbach conjecture when he was 10.
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Yitang Zhang worked as a laborer for 10 years and was unable to attend high school.
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Yitang Zhang became a graduate student of Professor Pan Chengbiao, a number theorist at Peking University, and obtained a master of science in mathematics in 1984.
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Yitang Zhang arrived at Purdue in January 1985, studied there for six and a half years, and obtained his PhD in mathematics in December 1991.
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Moh claimed that Yitang Zhang never came back to him requesting recommendation letters.
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In 2018, responding to reports of his treatment of Yitang Zhang, Moh posted an update on his website.
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Yitang Zhang worked in a motel in Kentucky and in a Subway sandwich shop.
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Yitang Zhang served as lecturer at UNH from 1999 until around January 2014, when UNH appointed him to a full professorship as a result of his breakthrough on prime numbers.
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Yitang Zhang stayed for a semester at The Institute For Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in 2014, and he joined the University of California, Santa Barbara in fall 2015.
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Yitang Zhang's paper was accepted by Annals of Mathematics in early May 2013, his first publication since his last paper in 2001.
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Yitang Zhang's result set off a flurry of activity in the field, such as the Polymath8 project.
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Yitang Zhang was awarded the 2013 Morningside Special Achievement Award in Mathematics, the 2013 Ostrowski Prize, the 2014 Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory, and the 2014 Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics.
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Yitang Zhang is a recipient of the 2014 MacArthur award, and was elected as an Academia Sinica Fellow during the same year.
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Yitang Zhang was an invited speaker at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians.
20.
In 1989 Yitang Zhang joined a group interested in Chinese democracy.