这篇文章(http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.2658v2.pdf)里有一段关于张益唐的话很有意思:

p.6:

Remark. Y. Zhang attributes the result [MP] to himself (and proves it again in his work [Zha]) despite the fact that the authors Motohashi and Pintz called his attention in four subsequent e-mails to their work and asked him to mention this fact in his manuscript in May–June 2013, when his manuscript appeared first electronically on the webpage of Annals of Mathematics. He completely ignored and left unanswered three of them and answered the fourth one in one line, refusing to add anything on it, based on his assertion that “when preparing my manuscript I had not read your paper.” Finally the printed version of his work appeared without any reference to [MP] (see [Zha]), despite the fact that he described in an interview that he got the idea to use a smoothed GPY sieve on July 3rd, 2012 and that was crucial to his solution [Kla]. This was more than 6 years later than the appearance of “A smoothed GPY sieve” on arXiv on February 27, 2006.

作者是Janos Pintz。

有意思。

“A smoothed GPY sieve” 除了是 [MP] 的标题外，不知是否同时也是一个有可能被人独立提及的术语，就像 “A smooth XXX function” 既可以是文章标题，也可能被人独立提及一样？假如 “A smoothed GPY sieve” 是一个非常独特，未读过 [MP] 的人不太可能独立提及的术语，则张益唐的做法确实是可争议。

翻了翻Tao的博客,在这篇博文里有这样一段:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/new-equidistribution-estimates-of-zhang-type-and-bounded-gaps-between-primes-and-a-retrospective/

However, Zhang (and independently, Motohashi and Pintz) observed that one does not need the full strength of (3) in order to obtain the conclusions of Goldston-Pintz-Yildirim.

这应当是张益唐证明的核心内容之一.我猜Pintz那番话是想让张益唐知道自己更早发现了破局的关键要素,劝张益唐引用自己的文章.结果张益唐没有理会……