Trailblazing mathematician Yitang Zhang leaves US for job at Chinese university
Chinese-American mathematician Yitang Zhang has left the United States to join Sun Yat-sen University in southern China as a full-time professor.
The 70-year-old number theorist has been appointed to the university's newly established Institute of Advanced Study Hong Kong and will live and work in the
Greater Bay Area , the university announced at a ceremony on Friday afternoon.
While the university did not give further details about his appointment, it noted that Zhang had relocated to China with his family. Zhang spent a decade as a mathematics professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Zhang is best known for his groundbreaking work on prime numbers. In a 2013 paper published in the Annals of Mathematics, he proved for the first time that infinitely many pairs of prime numbers are separated by a bounded gap. The result marked a major step towards solving the twin prime conjecture – a fundamental unsolved problem in mathematics – and reignited global interest in number theory.
Born in Shanghai in 1955, Zhang showed a strong talent for maths from an early age. He was unable to attend high school during the Cultural Revolution but taught himself and was admitted to Peking University in 1978.
In 1985, he went to Purdue University in the US for his PhD. After graduating in 1991, he struggled to find an academic position. To make ends meet, Zhang worked various jobs, including as an accountant, restaurant manager, and Chinese food delivery driver, and at one point lived in his car.
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