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Concept
Twin prime
Summary
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 or 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.
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), ... .
Five is the only prime that belongs to two pairs, as every twin prime pair greater than (3, 5) is of the form for some natural number n; that is, the number 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
for some absolute constant
In fact, it is bounded above by
where is the twin prime constant (slightly less than 2/3), given below.
Official source
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