> The article talks not just about Zhang, but also about James Maynard, who is a postdoc and looks young, and is part of what you might call standard academia. His result is independent of Zhang's and is orders of magnitude stronger and is much easier to understand.
Maynard has done some stellar work to be sure, but he built off of Zhang's breakthrough. Maynard's result is one of a sequence of very quick findings all happening in just months after Zhang's work became public, all make possible by that work, and relatively easy, as can be seen from their number and rapid pace.
I have not read all the papers here, but my guess is that Zhang's result is hugely more impressive.
> Maynard has done some stellar work to be sure, but he built off of Zhang's breakthrough.
That was actually not my understand from the article (I haven't read the papers either). What I got was that there was an earlier paper ("GPY") that Zhang based his work on. Maynard based his work on a flawed predecessor of GPY. Thus he did not base his work on Zhang's. In fact, the article seems to indicate that further progress could be made by combining their approaches, but it certainly seems from my reading that they're independent. Of course, that could all be wrong, but it is what the article indicates.
Actually at the bottom of page 2 of Maynard's preprint he states:
"We emphasize that the above result does not incorporate any of the technology used by Zhang to establish the existence of bounded gaps between primes."
So it seems like it is actually a coincidence, though they were both building off of the same previous work (GPY) so maybe it's not that surprising.
That is only a tactic move. it is Zhang's work inspired him to look for a quick better alternative. Zhang showed " there is gold! " And then Maynard ran towards that.
The article makes it very clear that his work is completely independent from Zhang's, which is why there is expectation that they can be used together to get bounds into the 10s, and maybe even below that limit.
Maynard has done some stellar work to be sure, but he built off of Zhang's breakthrough. Maynard's result is one of a sequence of very quick findings all happening in just months after Zhang's work became public, all make possible by that work, and relatively easy, as can be seen from their number and rapid pace.
I have not read all the papers here, but my guess is that Zhang's result is hugely more impressive.