A twin prime is a prime number that is either 2 less or 2 more than another prime number—for example, either member of the twin prime pair (17, 19) or (41, 43). In other words, a twin prime is a prime that has a prime gap of two. Sometimes the term twin prime is used for a pair of twin primes; an alternative name for this is prime twin or prime pair. Twin primes become increasingly rare as one examines larger ranges, in keeping with the general tendency of gaps between adjacent primes to become larger as the numbers themselves get larger. However, it is unknown whether there are infinitely many twin primes (the so-called twin prime conjecture) or if there is a largest pair. The breakthrough work of Yitang Zhang in 2013, as well as work by James Maynard, Terence Tao and others, has made substantial progress towards proving that there are infinitely many twin primes, but at present this remains unsolved.
Properties Usually the pair (2, 3) is not considered to be a pair of twin primes. Since 2 is the only even prime, this pair is the only pair of prime numbers that differ by one; thus twin primes are as closely spaced as possible for any other two primes. The first several twin prime pairs are
(3, 5), (5, 7), (11, 13), (17, 19), (29, 31), (41, 43), (59, 61), (71, 73), (101, 103), (107, 109), (137, 139), ... OEIS: A077800. Five is the only prime that belongs to two pairs, as every twin prime pair greater than (3, 5) is of the form ( 6 n − 1 , 6 n + 1 ) {\displaystyle (6n-1,6n+1)} for some natural number n; that is, the number that falls between the two primes is a multiple of 6. As a result, the sum of any pair of twin primes (other than 3 and 5) is divisible by 12.
Brun's theorem
In 1915, Viggo Brun showed that the sum of reciprocals of the twin primes was convergent. This famous result, called Brun's theorem, was the first use of the Brun sieve and helped initiate the development of modern sieve theory. The modern version of Brun's argument can be used to show that the number of twin primes less than N does not exceed
C N ( log N ) 2 {\displaystyle {\frac {CN}{(\log N)^{2}}}}
for some absolute constant C > 0. In fact, it is bounded above by
8 C 2 N ( log N ) 2 [ 1 + O ( log log N log N ) ] , {\displaystyle {\frac {8C_{2}N}{(\log N)^{2}}}\left[1+\operatorname {\mathcal {O}} \left({\frac {\log \log N}{\log N}}\right)\right],}
where C 2 {\displaystyle C_{2}} is the twin prime constant (slightly less than 2/3), given below.
Twin prime conjecture The question of whether there exist infinitely many twin primes has been one of the great open questions in number theory for many years. This is the content of the twin prime conjecture, which states that there are infinitely many primes p such that p + 2 is also prime. In 1849, de Polignac made the more general conjecture that for every natural number k, there are infinitely many primes p such that p + 2k is also prime. The case k = 1 of de Polignac's conjecture is the twin prime conjecture. A stronger form of the twin prime conjecture, the Hardy–Littlewood conjecture, postulates a distribution law for twin primes akin to the prime number theorem. On 17 April 2013, Yitang Zhang announced a proof that there exists an integer N that is less than 70 million, where there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by N. Zhang's paper was accepted in early May 2013. Terence Tao subsequently proposed a Polymath Project collaborative effort to improve Zhang's bound. One year after Zhang's announcement, the bound had been reduced to 246, where it remains. These improved bounds were discovered independently by James Maynard and Terence Tao, using a different approach that was simpler than Zhang's. This second approach also gave bounds for the smallest f (m) needed to guarantee that infinitely many intervals of width f (m) contain at least m primes. Moreover (see also the next section) assuming the Elliott–Halberstam conjecture and its generalized form, the Polymath Project wiki states that the bound is 12 and 6, respectively.
Other theorems weaker than the twin prime conjecture In 1940, Paul Erdős showed that there is a constant c < 1 and infinitely many primes p such that p′ − p < c ln p where p′ denotes the next prime after p. What this means is that we can find infinitely many intervals that contain two primes (p, p′) as long as we let these intervals grow slowly in size as we move to bigger and bigger primes. Here, "grow slowly" means that the length of these intervals can grow logarithmically. This result was successively improved; in 1986 Helmut Maier showed that a constant c < 0.25 can be used. In 2004 Daniel Goldston and Cem Yıldırım showed that the constant could be improved further to c = 0.085786... . In 2005, Goldston, Pintz, and Yıldırım established that c can be chosen to be arbitrarily small, i.e.
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