Yitang Zhang was born in 1955. He obtained his Ph.D. at 36 but, having no publications nor the support of his advisor, he had to quit academia and work as an accountant and a delivery worker, sometimes sleeping in his car, while trying to make ends meet.

At 58 years old, he published an extremely influential paper on bounded gaps in prime numbers which suddenly gained him a large number of prizes, a prestigious university position and wide recognition in the world of mathematics.

At 67 years old, he recently published a proof of a weaker version of the nonexistence of Landau-Siegel zeros that is currently being reviewed. If it is correct, it would be an even greater achievement and a step toward solving the Riemann hypothesis.

In a world where every mathematician has dozens to hundreds of publications, he currently has a total of seven published academic papers.