Prime Numbers: Emergence and Relevance of Bilinear Decompositions

This talk will retrace the main steps of the modern theory of prime numbers and in particular how the combinatorial sieve combined with the Dirichlet series theory to give birth to the modern representation of the primes via a linear combination of terms, some of which are "linear", while other ones are "bilinear". This will lead us to the recent developments of Green & Tao, Mauduit & Rivat, Tao, Helfgott, and Bourgain, Sarnak & Ziegler, and to some of mines.