70,000,000 to 7000? Impressive!

Articles just keep coming along about the twin-primes work started by Yitang Zhang… this time a good piece from the always layman-accessible Amir Aczel (who it turns out actually worked with Zhang in a university math department a few years back):

http://tinyurl.com/ml6ula2

Mathematicians on the Web taking a collaborative approach to improve Zhang's initial 70,000,000 figure for an upper boundary twin-primes gap, have, in just a couple of months, reduced the figure to barely over 12,000; possibly even 7000 (awaiting some technical verifications)… and at this rate, only a short matter of time likely before even those figures may be improved upon... an amazing and fascinating accomplishment over such a brief time period, on a conjecture that had evaded great progress for decades.
Terry Tao's "progress report" on all of this (for the technically-inclined) was posted less than two weeks ago:

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/bounded-gaps-between-primes-polymath8-a-progress-report/