Vinogradov's theorem

In number theory, Vinogradov's theorem is a result which implies that any sufficiently large odd integer can be written as a sum of three prime numbers. It is a weaker form of Goldbach's weak conjecture, which would imply the existence of such a representation for all odd integers greater than five. It is named after Ivan Matveyevich Vinogradov, who proved it in the 1930s. Hardy and Littlewood had shown earlier that this result followed from the generalized Riemann hypothesis, and Vinogradov was able to remove this assumption. The full statement of Vinogradov's theorem gives asymptotic bounds on the number of representations of an odd integer as a sum of three primes. The notion of "sufficiently large" was ill-defined in Vinogradov's original work, but in 2002 it was shown that 101346 is sufficiently large.[1][2] Additionally numbers up to 1020 had been checked via brute force methods,[3] thus only a finite number of cases to check remained before the odd Goldbach conjecture would be proven or disproven. In 2013, Harald Helfgott proved Goldbach's weak conjecture for all cases.

  1. ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: Terrence Tao - Structure and Randomness in the prime numbers, UCLA. YouTube.
  2. ^ Liu, M. C.; Wang, T. Z. (2002). "On the Vinogradov bound in the three primes Goldbach conjecture". Acta Arithmetica. 105 (2): 133–175. doi:10.4064/aa105-2-3.
  3. ^ Saouter, Yannick (1998). "Checking the odd Goldbach conjecture up to 10²⁰". Mathematics of Computation. 67 (222): 863–866. doi:10.1090/S0025-5718-98-00928-4.