Prime numbers are the central characters in mathematics, the indivisible elements from which all other numbers are constructed. Around 300 B.C., Euclid proved that there’s an infinite number of them. Millennia later, in the late 19th century, mathematicians refined Euclid’s result and proved that the number of prime numbers over any very large interval between 1 and some number, x, is roughly x/log(x).

This estimate, called the prime number theorem, has only been proved to hold when x is really big, which raises the question — does it hold over shorter intervals?

Kaisa Matomäki, 32, grew up in the small town of Nakkila in western Finland, where she was a math star from an early age. She left home to attend a boarding school that specialized in math instruction, and as a senior she won first prize in a national mathematics competition. When she began serious mathematical research as a graduate student, she was drawn to prime numbers and, in particular, to questions about how they behave on smaller scales.

In 1896 mathematicians proved that roughly half of all numbers have an even number of prime factors and half have an odd number. In 2014 Matomäki, now a professor at the University of Turku in Finland, and her frequent collaborator, Maksym Radziwill of McGill University, proved that this statement also holds when you look at prime factors over short intervals. The methods they developed to accomplish this have been adopted by other prominent mathematicians, leading to a number of important results in the study of primes. For these achievements, Matomäki and Radziwill shared the 2016 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for young researchers in number theory.

But Matomäki’s results have only deepened the mystery surrounding primes. As she explained to Quanta Magazine, mathematicians had long assumed that a proof about even and odd numbers of prime factors over short intervals would lead inexorably to a proof about the prime number theorem over short intervals. Yet, when Matomäki achieved a proof of the first question, she found that a proof of the latter one moved even further out of reach — establishing once again that primes won’t be easily cornered.

In a pair of phone conversations, Quanta Magazine caught up with Matomäki to ask about the study of primes and the methods behind her breakthroughs. An edited and condensed version of our conversations follows.

Your work has dealt with two prominent related problems about prime numbers. Could you explain them?

One of the most fundamental theorems in analytic number theory is the prime number theorem, which says that the number of primes up to x is about x/log(x).

This is known to be equivalent to the fact that roughly half of the numbers up to x have an even number of prime factors and half of the numbers have an odd number of prime factors. It’s not obvious that the two are equivalent, but it’s known that they are equivalent because of facts related to the zeros of the Riemann zeta function.

So these two problems have been known to be equivalent for a long time. Where does your work on them begin?

I’ve been interested in questions about prime numbers and the prime number theorem, and that’s really related to this thing on the number of even and odd prime factors. So what Maksym Radziwill and I have studied is the local distribution of this thing. So even if you take a short sample of numbers, then typically about half of them have an even number of prime factors and half of them have an odd number of prime factors. This doesn’t only work from 1 to x, it also works in almost all very short segments.

Let’s talk about the methods you used to prove something about these very short segments — a way of working with something called multiplicative functions. These are a class of functions in which f(m x n) is the same thing as f(m) x f(n). Why are these functions interesting?

One can use them, for instance, to study these numbers that have an even number of prime factors or an odd number of prime factors. There is a multiplicative function that takes the value –1 if n has an odd number of prime factors and the value +1 if n has an even number of prime factors. This is sort of the most important example of a multiplicative function.

And you take these multiplicative functions and do a “decomposition” on them. What does that mean?

We take out a small prime factor from the number n. It’s a bit difficult to explain over the phone. We are looking at a typical number, n, in our desired interval, and we notice the number n has a small prime factor, and then we consider this small prime factor separately. So we write it as p x m where p is a small prime factor.