A teenager wearing a blue polo shirt and glasses.

After posting his proof, Daniel was accepted to the MIT as a math major.

There is a magazine calledQuanta Magazine.

He started designing crossword puzzles when he was a kid. He had to add the hobby to his other interests. After winning his regional spelling bee, he qualified for the national bee twice. "He gets focused on something, and it's just bang, bang, bang, until he succeeds" His first crossword puzzles were rejected by newspapers, but he continued to work on them. At the age of 13, he published a crossword in The New York Times. He is very persistent.

She said that the most recent obsession was more intense than most of his other work. He couldn't stop thinking about a math problem for more than a year.

One of the most important questions in mathematics is how to distinguish a prime number from a composite number. For hundreds of years mathematicians have been trying to find an efficient way to do it. The problem has become relevant in the context of modern cryptography, as some of the most widely used ones involve doing arithmetic with huge primes.

The quest for a fast, powerful primality test led to the discovery of a group of troublemakers. The Carmichael numbers are difficult to understand. The mid 1990s was when mathematicians proved there are infinitely many of them. Being able to say more about how they are distributed has posed a bigger challenge.

The new proof was inspired by recent work in the area of number theory. He was just 17 years old.

The Spark

He was drawn to mathematics from a young age. He was introduced to the subject by his parents. She is currently pursuing a PhD in math. He started asking her questions about the nature of the universe when he was 3. A professor at Indiana University thought that a child had a mathematical mind.

A few years ago, he came across a documentary about a mathematician who rose from obscurity after proving a landmark result that put an upper bound on the gaps between prime numbers. There was something that happened in Larsen. He couldn't stop thinking about the twin primes conjecture, a problem that mathematicians still hope to solve.

Daniel Larsen wouldn’t let go of an old question about Carmichael numbers. “It was just stubbornness on my part,” he said.

The lower the bound, the more pairs of primes that differ by less than 70 million. The statements about the gaps between primes were independently proved by the mathematicians. The gap has been reduced to 246.

It was difficult for him to understand some of the mathematics behind Maynard and Tao. The papers were too complex. He tried to read related work but found it hard to comprehend. He kept jumping from one result to the next until he found a paper that was both beautiful and understandable. The subject is Carmichael numbers, those strange numbers that can sometimes be mistaken for prime numbers.

All but Prime

In the mid 17th century, Pierre de Fermat wrote a letter to his friend Frénicle de Bessy, in which he stated what would become known as his "little theorem." No matter what b is, a multiple of N is always a multiple of N. 2 7 2 is a multiple of 7 because 7 is aprime number. A multiple of 7 is also referred to as 3 7 - 3.

There is a chance for a perfect test of a number. If N is a multiple of N, what if it's also a multiple of N? Is it possible that b is a multiple of N for all values of b?

In rare cases, N can still be a component. Even though 561 is not a prime number, it's still a multiple of 561. The mathematician Robert Carmichael is often credited with publishing the first example in 1910, though the Czech mathematician Vclav imerka found examples in 1885.

A teenager sitting and reading a notebook.

Some of the top people in number theory received a draft of the proof. They responded to his surprise.

There is a magazine calledQuanta Magazine.

These numbers are so similar to the primes that mathematicians wanted to better understand them. A decade before Carmichael's result, another mathematician came up with a similar definition. He didn't know if there were any numbers that fit the bill

The number N is a Carmichael number if and only if it meets three properties. It needs to have more than one factor. The prime factor can't be repeated. Every prime p that divides N also divides N. The number 566 is considered again. It is equal to 3 11 17 so it is clear that it is in line with the first two properties. If you want to show the last property, subtract 1 from each prime factor. Add 1 from 566. There are three numbers with the same number. The number is named after a person.

There are relatively few Carmichael numbers compared to the primes, which makes them hard to pin down. The breakthrough paper was published in 1994 by Red Alford, Andrew Granville and Carl Pomerance.

They didn't have the ability to say what those numbers looked like. They may have appeared in clusters along the number line. Is it possible to find a number in a short time? "Sure, you should be able to prove that there are no big gaps between them, that they should be relatively well spacing out."

He and his co-authors wanted to show that there will always be a Carmichael number between X and 2X. Jon Grantham is a mathematician at the Institute for Defense Analyses who has done related work.

No one was able to prove it for a long time. The techniques developed by Alford, Granville and Pomerance allowed them to show that there would be many Carmichael numbers, but they didn't give us a lot of control over where they'd be.

In November of 2021, Granville opened up an email from Larsen, who was 17 at the time. The paper looked correct when it was attached. He said that it wasn't easy to read. It was obvious when I read it that he wasn't messing around. He had a lot of great ideas.

A later version of the work was read by Pomerance. He said that his proof was advanced. Any mathematician would be very proud of the paper. A high school student is writing.

The results by Maynard and Tao on prime gaps were what drew him to the numbers.

Unlikely — Not Impossible

It seemed that it was so obvious, how hard can it be to prove it? It could be very difficult for him. The technology of our time is being tested.

A teenager with a blue shirt outside.

He set out to prove more than he was able to.

There is a magazine calledQuanta Magazine.

The authors of the 1994 paper showed how to create infinite numbers. They didn't have the ability to control the size of the primes. The numbers that were close in size were built with that in mind. His father was concerned about the problem. He thought it was unlikely that he would succeed. It would be devastating for him to give so much of himself to this and not get it.

He knew better than to try to get him to change his mind. He said that Daniel sticks with something when it interests him.

If you take a certain sequence of numbers, some of them must be prime. Maynard's techniques were combined with the methods used by other people. He was able to make sure that the primes he ended up with would vary in size, so that they would fit within the allotted time.

He has more power than we have ever had. He used Maynard's work to achieve this. It is difficult to use this progress on short gaps between primes. He was able to combine it with the question about the numbers.

He was able to show that the number must always be between X and 2X. His proof works for very small intervals. It is hoped that it will reveal other aspects of the strange numbers. Thomas Wright is a mathematician at a college in South Carolina. It changes a lot of things when it comes to proving things.

The person agreed. He said that you can do things you didn't think of.

He just started his freshman year at MIT. He doesn't know what problem he will work on next, but he wants to learn what's out there. He said he was taking courses and trying to be open minded.

He did all this without a college degree. He is going to be coming up with something in graduate school.

Sergiu Paşca in his lab at Stanford University, in front of a rack of equipment.

Human Brains Are Hard to Study. He Grows Useful Substitutes.