Watch Adam Spencer and find out how he became a maths nerd and more.

American mathematician and child prodigy

Jacob Barnett was diagnosed with Autism at age 2. He is not old enough to vote or drive a car.

At age 10, Jacob was formally accepted to the University as a full-time college student and went straight into a paid research position in the field of condensed matter physics. For his original work in this field, Jacob set a record, becoming the world’s youngest astrophysics researcher.

To read more about Jacob and see a Ted Talk click HERE.

The twin primes conjecture.

Yitang Zhang has presented a landmark paper that proved one of the great results in the history of number theory.

The Problem of Pairs

Prime numbers — those that have no factors other than 1 and themselves — are the atoms of arithmetic and have fascinated mathematicians since the time of Euclid, who proved more than 2,000 years ago that there are infinitely many of them.

Because prime numbers are fundamentally connected with multiplication, understanding their additive properties can be tricky. Some of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics concern basic questions about primes and addition, such as the twin primes conjecture, which proposes that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by only 2, and the Goldbach conjecture, which proposes that every even number is the sum of two primes. (By an astonishing coincidence, a weaker version of this latter question was settled in a paper posted online by Harald Helfgott of École Normale Supérieure in Paris while Zhang was delivering his Harvard lecture.) To read more click HERE.