Greek Mathematician Solves 78-Year-Old Riddle | Science - Greek Reporter

Greek mathematician Dimitris Koukoulopoulos along with his Oxford colleague James Maynard solved the “Duffin and Schaeffer conjecture” that has puzzled mathematicians of Analytic Number Theory for 78 years, inform Greek News, GreekReporter.com.

Dimitris Koukoulopoulos (left) with James Maynard

The 35-year-old scientist is an associate professor of Mathematics at the University of Montreal, and, together with Oxford University research professor James Maynard (32), has been able to prove or solve, in the language of mathematics, the “Duffin and Schaeffer conjecture”.

Koukoylopoulos spoke to the Athens – Macedonia News Agency about his endeavor and his background.

The “Duffin-Schaeffer conjecture”
The “Duffin-Schaeffer conjecture” expressed in 1941 by mathematicians R.J. Duffin and A.C. Schaeffer mentions the criteria we can set in order to approximate numbers if we exclude some denominators. The two mathematicians also introduced a detail that says that if we exclude some denominators, even a sparse subset of them, some numbers may never be approximated...

Education background
Dimitris Koukoulopoulos finished high school in Kozani and passed the Panhellenic exams to study mathematics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Then he got a post-graduate degree at the University of Illinois and from there he followed his mentor Kevin Ford at Princeton where he got a PhD. Then he continued at the University of Montreal and worked with Andrew Granville on a post-PhD program. 
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Source: Greek Reporter