5/12/14

Goldbach Conjecture - Unproven

The original statement Goldbach made was: Every integer greater than two can be written as the sum of two prime numbers, he wrote about this to a fellow mathematician called Euler. However, Goldbach considered 1 a prime number which we don't today. If he had thought that up today, it would be: Every integer greater than five can be written as the sum of three prime numbers. This conjecture has only been tested up to 400,000,000,000,000. Since numbers go on forever, it is hard to prove the conjecture.
Euler became interested in this problem and answered with an equivalent version: Every even number larger than two can be written as the sum of two prime numbers.
There is also the weak Goldbach conjecture. This conjecture states that every odd number larger than 5 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers.
Many mathematicians have tried to prove this. There is a $1,000,000 prize for anyone who can solve this from March 20, 2000 to March 20, 2002 as an encouragement to young mathematicians but the prize remained unclaimed. This conjecture is, like many things in math, hard to prove. Like many things in math, it is easy to understand yet frustratingly hard to prove. No one really knows why it is so hard to prove. 
Schnirelman proved that every even number is a sum of not more than 300,000 primes. This is however, very far from merely two primes! Estermann proved that most even numbers can be written as the sum of two prime numbers.
As for the weak Goldbach conjecture, Vinogradov proved that a sufficiently odd number can be written as the sum of three prime numbers.
Chen also proved that a sufficiently large even numbers are the sum of a prime and the product of two primes.
This link that will help you understand more. 

Next Time: Twin Primes

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