The content of Goldbach conjecture is very concise, but its proof is extremely difficult. From the date of Goldbach's letter to 1920, there is no way to prove this problem.

1900, at the second international conference on mathematics held in Paris, German mathematician david hilbert put forward 23 questions to mathematicians in the 20th century in his famous speech, and Goldbach conjecture was part of his eighth question.

19 12 years, at the 5th International Mathematical Congress held in Cambridge, England, German mathematician E Landau listed Goldbach conjecture as one of the four major problems in number theory that could not be solved according to the mathematical level at that time.

192 1 year, Harold Hardy, a number theorist and a British number theorist, declared in a speech at the Mathematical Society in Gothenhagen, Germany that the difficulty of guessing "can be compared with any unsolved problem in mathematics".

China mathematician Wang Yuan said: "Goldbach conjecture is not only number theory, but also one of the most famous and difficult problems in the whole mathematics."

Study history

Hua was the first mathematician in China who engaged in Goldbach conjecture. From 1936 to 1938, he went to England to study, studied number theory under Hardy, and began to study Goldbach conjecture, which almost verified all even conjectures.

From 65438 to 0950, after returning from the United States, Hua organized a seminar on number theory at the Institute of Mathematics of China Academy of Sciences, and chose Goldbach conjecture as the topic of discussion. Wang Yuan, Pan Chengdong, Chen Jingrun and other students who attended the seminar made good achievements in proving Goldbach's conjecture.

1956, Wang Yuan proved "3+4"; In the same year, the mathematician A.V. Noguera Dov of the former Soviet Union proved "3+3"; 1957, Wang Yuan proved "2+3"; Pan chengdong proved "1+5" in 1962; In 1963, Pan Chengdong, Barba En and Wang Yuan all proved "1+4".

1966, Chen Jingrun proved "1+2" after making new and important improvements to the screening method, that is, he proved that any even number large enough can be expressed as the sum of two numbers, one of which is a prime number, the other is a prime number, or the product of two prime numbers, which is called "Chen Theorem".