Yitang Zhang

Yitang Zhang is the closest thing pure math has to a folk hero, and I find his story genuinely moving. Working as a relatively obscure lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, he quietly produced a breakthrough on bounded gaps between primes that stunned the field in 2013. The cascade of honors that followed, the Cole Prize, Ostrowski, the Schock, a MacArthur, all came late and feel earned rather than hyped. What I take from him is patience: that someone outside the spotlight can solve a problem the experts couldn't crack. That's the kind of quiet persistence I admire far more than overnight success.

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Name (English)

Yitang Zhang

Name (Japanese)

張益唐

Reading

ちょう・えきとう

Born

1955

Origin

Pinghu, People's Republic of China

Occupation

mathematician

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Goat

High school

Tsinghua University High School

University

Peking University

Awards & achievements

• 2014 Cole Prize in Number Theory
• 2013 Ostrowski Prize
• 2014 Rolf Schock Prize in Mathematics
• 2014 MacArthur Fellows Program

• Official sitehttps://www.math.ucsb.edu/people/yitang-tom-zhang
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang%20Zhang
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BC%B5%E7%9B%8A%E5%94%90
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q13360454

Tags

• mathematician

Last updated

September 18, 2026

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.