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Amar Bose, the name almost symbolizes high quality sound has passed away. Years ago, I had come across reading up something about the man who had inspired the making of something that I literally use everyday, the Bose Wave music system. A tiny box which uses crisp quality sound has been my favourite since 2006.

Bose’s life reflects a successful life of a passionate researcher who fearlessly chased his dream, produced a world-class product and organization. What amazes me is that, he managed to do all this, while still staying as a faculty, having involved in a good share of regular teaching activities and formal student advising (For starters, Alan Oppenheim was his student). It is widely known that he was a great motivator as well as an exceptional teacher, said to have enthralled audience anytime, anywhere. If this is of any indication, then we can imagine how great it would have been to be in one of his class.

I have read and heard many stories of him, about his experience with starting up of Bose corporation, interaction with his illustrious professor Yuk-Wing Lee (who was instrumental in motivating the young Bose in eventually starting up a company; It was he apparently who donated his life savings of \$10,000 in 1950s to seed in the making of what is now a multi million corporation) and also the rather interesting and embarrassing event where he had to his first ever public/technical talk on Wiener’s (then recent) work to a celebrated audience which had included a certain Norbert Wiener himself.  After knowing a bit about all the Wiener stories, I pause to think, how different an experience that would have been! Anyway, Bose’s legacy will easily stretch beyond mere Bose corporation and MIT. His life is a message of courage and pursuit of passion, if not anything else. RIP.

For consecutive ($n$th and $n+1$th)primes $p_n$ and $p_{n+1}$, the asymptotic gap $\mathcal{G}= \lim_{n \to \infty}{\inf}\left({{p_{n+1}}-{p_{n}}}\right)$ has got a fresh renewal off late. The famous twin prime conjecture says $\mathcal{G}=2$, but that is still a conjecture and not a proof. Recently, Zhang proved that $\mathcal{G}$ is a finite number and a number definitely not bigger than $70,000,000$. It was hoped that one day, the mathematical community will find a number lower than this and perhaps even the holy grail mark of $\mathcal{G}=2$.

Now what? Within a span of a month or so, the established gap of 70 million has improved to a thousand odd number and is still on a path of decent. Still some distance to the ultimate mark of 2, but boy, does collaboration work? Ever since the now famous breakthrough from Zhang touched the broad light (I had scribed my little thoughts on that earlier!), Terrance Tao and his team steadily managed to improve the bound.  Tao has already knitted a nice and detailed summary on the progress. As of last week, the proven gap was $12,006$, but now the updated gap could be as small as $5414$ (which is still under verification as per polymath8 project page). Let us hope that, they can go all he way to prove the twin prime conjecture, one day!

It is interesting to read, from Tao’s blog (which any day is a treasure trove of many topics, thankfully written with a wider audience in mind) the several connections they made, including that to Elliott–Halberstam conjecture, for improving this fascinating distance between prime successors.

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