What's New?
(August 11 - 22, 2008)
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New Findings Could Help Explain How Some Bacteria
Resist Antibiotics (2/15/06) - An experiment designed to show
how a usually innocuous bacterium regulates the expression of an
unnecessary gene for green color has turned up a previously unrecognized
phenomenon that could partially explain a feature of bacterial
pathogenicity.
The
American Institute of Mathematics sent out a press release on 3/21
announcing that researchers are getting closer to identifying the
frequency and location of twin primes - prime numbers that differ by
two.
Dan Goldston has
devised a completely new approach to the problem of identifying the
frequency and location of "twin primes." He and fellow researcher, Cem
Yildirim, have published their findings in a paper entitled "Small Gaps
Between Primes." The details of Goldston's research can be found
here.
From the press release: "Prime number research has long been the focus of gifted mathematicians. As early as the Third Century B.C., the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes developed a way to systematically find the prime numbers. Since then, notable mathematicians such as Fermat (17th Century), Riemann (1859), Hardy and Littlewood (1920s), and Bombieri and Davenport (1965) have contributed foundational theory on the pattern of prime numbers -- numbers that cannot be divided by any number smaller than themselves (other than 1) without leaving a remainder. "Small primes are relatively easy to determine; it's the large prime numbers with which mathematicians have been wrestling. The smallest prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 and 19. Since prime numbers are the building blocks of the integers (they can be multiplied to obtain all of the other integers), these small primes are familiar to elementary school students. Anyone with an interest in patterns may observe that primes occur in twins with a surprising regularity: 11,13; 17, 19; 29, 31; 41, 43; 59, 61. "Just as with primes, the frequency of twin primes decreases as one progresses to higher numbers. But do they completely fizzle out beyond some very large number? No one knows the answer for certain, but Goldston's new theory significantly advances mathematicians' knowledge of how primes are distributed, and even shines some light on the hard-to-identify location of very large prime numbers." For more information about prime numbers, visit The Prime Pages.
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