Goldbach's Conjecture - Rigorous Results

Rigorous Results

Considerable work has been done on the weak Goldbach conjecture.

The strong Goldbach conjecture is much more difficult. Using Vinogradov's method, Chudakov, van der Corput, and Estermann showed that almost all even numbers can be written as the sum of two primes (in the sense that the fraction of even numbers which can be so written tends towards 1). In 1930, Lev Schnirelmann proved that every even number n ≥ 4 can be written as the sum of at most 20 primes. This result was subsequently enhanced by many authors; currently, the best known result is due to Olivier Ramaré, who in 1995 showed that every even number n ≥ 4 is in fact the sum of at most six primes. In fact, resolving the weak Goldbach conjecture will also directly imply that every even number n ≥ 4 is the sum of at most four primes.

Chen Jingrun showed in 1973 using the methods of sieve theory that every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of either two primes, or a prime and a semiprime (the product of two primes)—e.g., 100 = 23 + 7·11. See Chen's theorem.

In 1975, Hugh Montgomery and Robert Charles Vaughan showed that "most" even numbers were expressible as the sum of two primes. More precisely, they showed that there existed positive constants c and C such that for all sufficiently large numbers N, every even number less than N is the sum of two primes, with at most exceptions. In particular, the set of even integers which are not the sum of two primes has density zero.

Linnik proved in 1951 the existence of a constant K such that every sufficiently large even number is the sum of two primes and at most K powers of 2. Roger Heath-Brown and Jan-Christoph Schlage-Puchta in 2002 found that K = 13 works. This was improved to K=8 by Pintz and Ruzsa in 2003.

As with many famous conjectures in mathematics, there are a number of purported proofs of the Goldbach conjecture, none accepted by the mathematical community.