Twin Prime Proof Erroneous

mindriot writes "The fairly recent perceived breakthrough in prime number theory regarding twin primes, as mentioned on slashdot, is apparently not quite perfect: 'On April 23rd, Andrew Granville of the Universite de Montreal and K. Soundararajan of the University of Michigan found a technical difficulty buried in one of the arguments in the preprint of Goldston and Yildrim. The main issue is that some quantities which were believed to be small error terms are actually the same order of magnitude as the main term. For now this difficulty remains unresolved.' A more detailed technical description is also available."

Comments

Re:A serious question - i'm not trolling, honest!

[phliar]

I can understand calculating pi to the nth point as it is used in calculations...

That is not a very good reason! Let's say we use pi = 355/113 -- an approximation that's been known for many centuries -- to calculate the circumference of the earth. Using that value of pi our estimate will be off by about 30 feet (about 0.00003%). Even 22/7 is only off by 0.1%.

No; we calculate the umpty-bazillionth digit of pi for the same reason Mallory wanted to climb Everest: because it's there -- and there's cool shit to see along the way.