In Memoriam

Researchers in this directory who are no longer with us

The Top 100 and the regional pages list living researchers only, so the directory stays accurate for anyone using it to make contact. This page remembers the 23 researchers from the ranked pool who have passed away, plus a separate listing of foundational figures whose careers predate the digital publication record our pipeline reads from.

Foundational figures

The pipeline behind this site ranks researchers whose work appears on arXiv or in OpenAlex, which mostly means careers active from the mid-1990s onward. The names below predate that coverage. Their work is the bedrock on which modern Goldbach research is built; every modern paper in this directory ultimately rests on the circle method (Hardy-Littlewood, Vinogradov, van der Corput), the sieve toolkit (Halberstam-Richert, Linnik), and the breakthroughs of Chen Jingrun, Wang Yuan, and Hua Loo-Keng. They are listed by last name.

Foundational figures: contributions

• J. G. van der Corput (1890-1975): Van der Corput's method for exponential sums; foundational for the circle method
• Theodor Estermann (1902-1991): Goldbach-Estermann theorem; early progress on the ternary problem
• Chen Jingrun (1933-1996): Chen's theorem: every sufficiently large even integer is the sum of a prime and a product of at most two primes, the strongest known partial result toward Goldbach
• Anatoly A. Karatsuba (1937-2008): Analytic number theory, exponential sums, and the Karatsuba multiplication algorithm; advisor to a major Russian school
• Yu. V. Linnik (1915-1972): Linnik's theorem, the dispersion method, and the Linnik constant
• Ming-Chit Liu (1937-2023): Set a record on the ternary Goldbach problem with an effective bound (with Tianze Wang
• Hua Loo-Keng (1910-1985): Hua's lemma; founded the Chinese school of analytic number theory
• Karl Prachar (1925-1994): Primzahlverteilung (1957), the standard reference on prime distribution for two generations
• Hans-Egon Richert (1924-1993): Sieve Methods (with Halberstam); the standard reference
• Askold Ivanovich Vinogradov (1929-1986): Bombieri-Vinogradov theorem on average prime distribution
• Ivan Matveyevich Vinogradov (1891-1983): Proved the ternary Goldbach conjecture for sufficiently large odd integers (1937)
• Arnold Walfisz (1892-1962): Siegel-Walfisz theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions
• Wang Yuan (1930-2021): Wang (1+4) result; key contributor to the Chinese school of additive prime number theory

From the ranked pool