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Twin Prime Numbers

Floor Speech

Date: Feb. 11, 2014
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Science

Mr. McNERNEY. Madam Speaker, I would like to talk about twin prime numbers. Twin primes are two prime numbers separated by a single number, like 11 and 13, or 17 and 19. The question is, Are there an infinite number of twin primes? It was the general consensus of the mathematical community until just recently that that question was beyond the capability of our current mathematical community.

However, there have been some stunning advances on this problem in the last few years. In particular, last May, with the help of an online collaborative project, mathematicians pioneered new methods for addressing this problem with a huge breakthrough from Tom Zhang at the University of New Hampshire. We now know that there are an infinite number of prime number pairs separated by amounts smaller than 270.

While the twin prime problem itself is still unsolved, mathematicians are hopeful that this year they can reduce the separation from 270 to less than 100.


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