Math News...

Terence Tao has just published a paper, titled “Every odd number greater than 1 is the sum of at most five primes”.  He's also got a blog post describing it.

The notion really is as simple as his title makes it sound.  Pick any old odd number you'd like – let's say, 333.  He's asserting that you can find 1 to 5 prime numbers which, when added together, equals 333.  Let's try:

333 = 331 + 2
333 = 283 + 43 + 7

There it is, in two different ways.

I have a fascination for these sorts of number conjectures that I can't quite explain, and it's so far an unrequited fascination, as much of the math involved is beyond me (there are bits and pieces that I can grasp, but on most of it I'm just taking their word).  But the very idea that one could actually prove something (either true or false!) like the Goldbach conjecture seems pretty darned close to magical to me...