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Concept
Goldbach's conjecture
Summary
Goldbach's conjecture is one of the oldest and best-known unsolved problems in number theory and all of mathematics. It states that every even natural number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers.
The conjecture has been shown to hold for all integers less than 4e18, but remains unproven despite considerable effort.
On 7 June 1742, the German mathematician Christian Goldbach wrote a letter to Leonhard Euler (letter XLIII), in which he proposed the following conjecture:
Goldbach was following the now-abandoned convention of considering 1 to be a prime number, so that a sum of units would indeed be a sum of primes.
He then proposed a second conjecture in the margin of his letter, which implies the first:
eine jede Zahl, die grösser ist als 2, ein aggregatum trium numerorum primorum sey.
Every integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of three primes.
Euler replied in a letter dated 30 June 1742 and reminded Goldbach of an earlier conversation they had had ("... so Ew vormals mit mir communicirt haben ..."), in which Goldbach had remarked that the first of those two conjectures would follow from the statement
This is in fact equivalent to his second, marginal conjecture.
In the letter dated 30 June 1742, Euler stated:
Dass ... ein jeder numerus par eine summa duorum primorum sey, halte ich für ein ganz gewisses theorema, ungeachtet ich dasselbe nicht demonstriren kann.That ... every even integer is a sum of two primes, I regard as a completely certain theorem, although I cannot prove it.
Each of the three conjectures above has a natural analog in terms of the modern definition of a prime, under which 1 is excluded.
A modern version of the first conjecture is:
A modern version of the marginal conjecture is:
And a modern version of Goldbach's older conjecture of which Euler reminded him is:
These modern versions might not be entirely equivalent to the corresponding original statements.
Official source
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