Daniel Larsen is a mathematician whose work focuses on shortening the lengths of Bertrand's postulate on the twin primes conjecture when applied to Carmichael numbers.
Larsen was born in Bloomington, Indiana to Ayelet Lindenstrauss and Michael Larsen and had a strong interest in mathematics as a child, inspired by the mathematician background of both his parents.[1] His father hosted a Math Circle when he was younger that taught math on the weekend to kids in the neighborhood and Larsen attended despite being only four years old. He also had a strong interest in other projects, learning violin at age 5 and piano at age 6, along with practicing solving larger configurations of Rubik's Cubes and designing his own coin sorting robot from Legos. He competed in the Scripps National Spelling Bee twice while in middle school, though never made it to the final round.[2]
While attending Bloomington High School South, he became the youngest accepted contributor to The New York Times crossword puzzle in February of 2017 and ended up submitting 11 approved puzzles before his graduation from high school.[3][4] He applied to and became a finalist in the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search for his published research on Carmichael numbers and ultimately won 4th place in the competition.[5] In the fall of 2022, he began attending university at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[1]
During his teenage years after watching a documentary about Yitang Zhang, Larsen became interested in number theory and the twin primes conjecture in particular. The subsequent strengthening of the conjecture by James Maynard and Terence Tao not long after strengthened his desire to better understand the math involved. But he found it too complex at the time and it wasn't until reading a paper in February of 2021 on Carmichael numbers that he gained insight on the fundamentals of the problem.[1] That same year in November, Larsen published a paper titled "Bertrand's Postulate for Carmichael Numbers"[6] on the open access repository arXiv that made a more consolidated proof of Maynard and Tao's postulate but involving Carmichael numbers into the twin primes conjecture. He then emailed a copy of the paper to mathematician Andrew Granville and others involved in number theory research.[1] The paper was later published in the journal International Mathematics Research Notices.[2]