Two years ago, Daniel Goldston and his collaborators proved that there always exist primes that are very close together. With that success, Goldston hoped that their method would soon lead to a proof that there are infinitely often pairs of primes closer than some fixed bounded distance. Such a proof would be a giant step toward resolving the twin prime conjecture. Goldston comes to MathFest to discuss the methods that he and his colleagues used and to talk about why further progress towards a proof of the twin prime conjecture may be more difficult than he had originally thought.
Goldston's lecture, Revenge of the Twin Prime Conjecture, will be given on Saturday, Aug. 4, at 8:30 a.m., as an MAA Invited Address.
Currently a professor at San Jose State University, Goldston received his undergraduate and graduate education at the University of California, Berkeley. His main research interest is analytic number theory.—R. Miller
Register for MathFest at http://www.maa.org/mathfest.