In the distraction of the scandal fever swirling through Washington and the news media, you might have missed the announcement the other day that one of the great puzzles of number theory had been solved.
What makes the news most fascinating is that the solver isn’t on the faculty of a top university and wasn’t known until this month to others who work in the field. He is a Chinese immigrant in his 50s named Yitang Zhang, a one time accountant and part-time lecturer at the University of New Hampshire who used to make sandwiches in a Subway shop. Said one leading number theorist: “Basically, no one knows him.”
Cue the agents and film producers.
Because the story gets better.
The achievement that has inspired such awe among mathematicians is Zhang’s proof of the “weak” form of the twin prime conjecture-a proof so strong that he was recently asked to present it to an audience at Harvard University. This isn’t the place to explain what the twin prime conjecture is, or why it has a strong and weak form, or even why the solution has posed such a challenge.
The fascinating part is how Zhang succeeded where others had failed. There was no flash of genius, no invention of an entirely new methodology. He saw the promise in an approach that others had abandoned, and-mirabile dictu!-had enough faith in his idea to stick with it until everything clicked. (Note to producers: Be sure to write in mocking younger colleagues, who thought the old guy was past it. See if Benedict whatshisname-the Star Trek guy-is available.)
The story’s had a bit of coverage, but not nearly what it deserves. The media by and large aren’t terribly excited about science these days. Technology, sure-on the personal level.
Pure science, however, discovery for discovery’s sake-using our brains because we have them-doesn’t get a lot of air time.
I’ve noted before that we may be losing a generation of pure scientists. It has become a truism that many of the brightest science, technology, engineering and math majors are passing up graduate study for law or business school. I am old enough to remember when young people looked with admiration and even envy on their gifted peers who planned to be scientists. Nowadays, a facility with numbers is a highly valued skill and the returns on careers in law and finance dwarf what they could earn in the academy or the research laboratory. Whenever I’m asked how the students have changed over my three decades of law teaching, I point to the growing disproportion of science majors.
We need to recover what the late Carl Sagan called “the romance of science.” We can do this in part by coming to appreciate the human side. The media can do their part by paying more attention to stories like that of Yitang Zhang-“Tom” to his friends and students-because there is human interest everywhere, if we but choose to look.
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Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a professor of law at Yale University.
Editorial, Pages 18 on 05/25/2013