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Zhang 2022 proves a somewhat suspicious formula:

$$L(1,\chi) \gg (\log D)^{-2022}$$

This raises the obvious-but-frivolous question: did he intentionally weaken the constant to get the current year?

Geoffrey Irving
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    You might want to look at this short twitter thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/mattecapu/status/1588846559772352512. Indeed, it seems clear that 2022 was just an arbitrary-ish number, and establishing the qualitative behavior of the inequality was more important than obtaining the sharpest possible results. – Sam Hopkins Nov 08 '22 at 14:12
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    @SamHopkins: Thank you! That seems like a positive answer if it holds up. – Geoffrey Irving Nov 08 '22 at 14:15
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    (Also, in case it confuses anyone, David Roberts's first tweet there is slightly wrong: as explained in answers to https://mathoverflow.net/questions/433949/, this result would improve the error term in the Prime Number Theorem in Arithmetic Progressions, but has no bearing on the usual PNT itself...) – Sam Hopkins Nov 08 '22 at 15:43
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    You are forgetting about one possibility: maybe he strengthened the constant to get the current year :-) – Carl-Fredrik Nyberg Brodda Nov 08 '22 at 16:51
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    ^ This would indeed make the joke much cooler. – Geoffrey Irving Nov 08 '22 at 22:12
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    Does anyone know any other public venues where Zhang's preprint is being discussed? – kodlu Nov 09 '22 at 15:04
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    Yes, my apologies about the blooper! – David Roberts Nov 10 '22 at 13:03

1 Answers1

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According to himself, yes. The following is a link to some of his comments that he posted on a Chinese forum. https://www.zhihu.com/question/564799818/answer/2752632822

Regarding the question of whether the fixed power of logD , which is taken for many parameters in the paper, is to get the number 2022, in terms of the Landau-Siegel zero itself, that should be a power of logD, and the conjectured should actually be -1. My method can lead to an exponent of negative several hundred which I did not calculate carefully, yet I can guarantee -2022. Since this year is 2022, I chose it casually. Often people do this kind of thing, so this also does not have any special meaning, just like the previous 70 million (in the bounded gaps between primes paper).

Bill Johnson
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