The Twin Prime Hero

Yitang “Tom” Zhang spent the seven years following the completion of his Ph.D. in mathematics floating between Kentucky and Queens, working for a chain of Subway restaurants, and doing odd accounting work. Now he is on a lecture tour that includes stops at Harvard, Columbia, Caltech, and Princeton, is fielding multiple professorship offers, and spends two hours a day dealing with the press. That’s because, in April, Zhang proved a theorem that had eluded mathematicians for a century or more. When we called Zhang to see what he thought of being thrust into the spotlight, we found a shy, modest man, genuinely disinterested in all the fuss.

Mathematicians don’t tend to get famous. That’s probably because it’s hard for the public to grasp what they do. The importance of the light bulb, penicillin, or DNA is easy to understand, and Edison, Fleming, and Crick are household names. The likes of Euler, Riemann, or Dirichlet seem, by comparison, outside of mainstream awareness.

But mathematicians also star in some of the most dramatic stories in science. The lone, unrecognized genius laboring away on a groundbreaking theory over many years is more fiction than fact for most of modern science—but not in mathematics. Andrew Wiles’ 1995 proof of Fermat’s last theorem, which had defied all efforts to prove it for more