Last weekend I wrote about Goldbach’s conjecture which involved the sums of prime numbers. Keeping with the theme of easy-to-state-number-theory-problems, I decided to mention the Twin Prime Conjecture this week.
We call a prime number a twin prime if you can reach another prime by either adding or subtracting 2. For example: 3 + 2 = 5, 13 – 2 = 11.
The conjecture is that there are an infinite number of twin primes. (We know there are an infinite number of primes.) Computers have been used to calculate twin primes which are very large (5,000+ digits) but it will take more than pure calculation to solve this conjecture…
Sylvia Morris 