Math & Cultural
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| Location: | http://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/calendar/screen-counting-infinity%E2%80%94yitang-zhang-twin-prime-conjecture |
Join MSRI's director, David Eisenbud, for the Bay Area premiere screening of Counting from Infinity: Yitang Zhang and the Twin Prime Conjecture, a 56-minute feature film directed by George Csicsery and produced by MSRI.
Thursday, May 14, 2015, 7:00 p.m.
Exploratorium, Kanbar Forum
Pier 15, Embarcadero at Green Street, San Francisco
Discussion to follow: David Eisenbud will join George Csicsery, the director of the film; and Daniel Alan Goldston, a mathematician featured in the film.
Tickets are $15 general admission, and $10 for members. There will be a cash bar reception following the screening and discussion. Ages 18+ only for this special event. Purchase tickets here.
About the film:
In April 2013, a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire submitted a paper to the Annals of Mathematics. Within weeks word spread—a little-known mathematician, with no permanent job, working in complete isolation had made an important breakthrough towards solving the Twin Prime Conjecture. Yitang Zhang’s techniques for bounding the gaps between primes soon led to rapid progress by the Polymath Group, and a further innovation by James Maynard.
The film is a study of Yitang Zhang’s rise from obscurity and a disadvantaged youth to mathematical celebrity. The story of Zhang’s quiet perseverance amidst adversity, and his preference for thinking and working in solitude, is interwoven with a history of the Twin Prime Conjecture as told by several mathematicians, many of whom have wrestled with this enormously challenging problem in Number Theory—Daniel Goldston, Kannan Soundararajan, Andrew Granville, Peter Sarnak, Enrico Bombieri, James Maynard, Nicholas Katz, David Eisenbud, Ken Ribet, and Terry Tao.
George Paul Csicsery, a writer and independent filmmaker since 1968, has directed 33 films, many about the lives and work of mathematicians. His best-known documentaries are N is a Number: a Portrait of Paul Erdös (1993), Julia Robinson and Hilbert’s Tenth Problem (2008), Hard Problems (2008), Hungry for Monsters (2004), and Where the Heart Roams (1987).
The film’s web site is countingfrominfinityfilm.com.
The film is produced through the generous support of the Simons Foundation.