Yin and Yang… No, Zipf and Zhang

A couple of pieces to catch up on if you've missed them:

Yitang Zhang, the largely unknown, humble New Hampshire mathematician who sort of broke open the twin prime conjecture earlier this year, is now deservedly being awarded the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Number Theory come January (he has already received the Ostrowski Prize). Read another lovely news story about this unforeseen math champion here:

http://www.unionleader.com/article/20131215/NEWS04/131219488

And the below article notes that Zipf's Law is finding more applications to human society than its original linguistic roots with which I was familiar (however, note that several commenters take issue with the article's author):

http://tinyurl.com/lakytzh