Lets say the inner geek was inspired and almost to tears!!<\/p>\n
Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know \u2014 someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1992 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop.
\n\u201cBasically, no one knows him,\u201d said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al. \u201cNow, suddenly, he has proved one of the great results in the history of number theory.\u201d
\nMathematicians at Harvard University hastily arranged for Zhang to present his work to a packed audience there on May 13. As details of his work have emerged, it has become clear that Zhang achieved his result not via a radically new approach to the problem, but by applying existing methods with great perseverance.
\n\u201cThe big experts in the field had already tried to make this approach work,\u201d Granville said. \u201cHe\u2019s not a known expert, but he succeeded where all the experts had failed.\u201d
\nvia Unknown Mathematician Proves Elusive Property of Prime Numbers | Wired Science | Wired.com<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lets say the inner geek was inspired and almost to tears!! Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know \u2014 someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1992 that he had found it difficult to get … <\/p>\n